EDITORIAL OBSERVATIONS. 
711 
the small intestines. These cases also occurred during a 
high temperature, and were due to the combined influence 
of heat, the feeding on grasses somewhat ergotized, and par¬ 
taking of water rendered impure by an admixture of sewage, 
and this to a greater extent than it otherwise would have by 
the gradual drying up of the pond. 
In a third case, the last we shall mention, and which 
occurred during the remarkably warm and humid month of 
October, the malady was not confined to a particular farm, 
but extended over an entire parish, and even beyond its 
bounds, destroying upwards of fifty animals in a very short 
space of time. It evidently depended on the amount and 
watery condition of the herbage, the character of the soil— 
a wet, clayey loam—and the system of management pursued 
by the owners of the cattle. The humid and warm tem¬ 
perature acting on the vegetation of a rich and retentive 
soil, produced a greater quantity of grass than, as a rule, the 
pastures contained in the month of June. Such grass, 
however, was necessarily very deficient in the elements of 
nutrition, and this in proportion to the amount of water 
which it contained, and therefore unfitted for the making of 
pure blood. The abundance of it, also, led to the cattle 
being kept entirely on the pastures night and day, without an 
allowance of any other food. Besides these causes of disease, 
the fogs which hung over the fields were often so dense as to 
hide the animals from observation when only a few yards 
distant, excepting for an hour or two in the middle of the 
day. The consequence was, that local h&mostasia resulted, 
or, in other words, the contaminated blood became stagnant 
in the vessels. Sometimes this took place in one part of the 
organism, and sometimes in another. The head and throat 
were the principal seat of it, but occasionally the fore or hinder 
extremities; nor were the internal organs exempt, as the 
lungs would now and then be primarily affected. 
In many respects the local symptoms were allied to those 
observed in hcematosepsis —black leg—but no gaseous mat¬ 
ters were evolved into the areolar tissue, as is the case in 
that malady. Cattle of all ages also were its victims, and 
that without respect to their being milking or fattening 
