48 DISEASE AMONG THE MID-LOTHIAN FOXHOUNDS. 
and healthy stimulant to excite the digestive organs to in¬ 
creased action, is not analogous in its o{)eration to an acrid 
or virulent poison, M’hich manifests its morbid action generally 
in a very short period of time after being swallowed. The 
class of deleterious poisons operates, as a fixed rule, violently 
and speedily, although even arsenic has been known to lie 
dormant for an unusually long period in the stomach, before 
producing fatal effects, ascertained by dissection after death 
when the poison was detected by analysis. But it is an ad¬ 
mitted fact that the poisons referred to very soon produce 
pain and vomiting when taken into the stomach, modified 
to some degree by the amount of food with which that organ 
may be charged, but there is no instance on record of the 
appetite remaining uninipaired upwards of twelve hours after 
the administration of an acrid deadly poison. It is therefore 
beyond dispute that there was no poison in the food given to 
the dogs on the Saturday evening, which was their first 
feeding, nor in the food they next got on the following 
morning, as none was found after death upon careful 
chemical analysis. If the first meal taken after the dogs 
returned from a long and fatiguing day’s hunt proved in¬ 
nocuous, it may naturally be asked, why should fatal results 
have arisen from the second meal? I have stated that the 
outbreak must be viewed in all its bearings to the series of 
the combined co-operating causes. The reaction after fatigue 
not only does not immediately follow, but usually takes 
place at a period more or less remote from the time of 
collapse. 
And I can account in no other way for a whole pack of 
hounds being seized within twenty-four hours after being fed 
the second time, under the circumstances to which they had 
been exposed on the previous day, and without any new or 
additional cause of disordered or deranged functions, than on 
the supposition that a morbid action had superinduced slowly 
and insidiously, but to such an extent that the food, in place 
of acting as a natural restorative in a healthy condition of 
the digestive organs, was converted into and became an 
irritant poison. To what other cause, let me ask, can so 
many deaths, and such a similar train of violent symptoms, 
be^ascribed? In a disordered state of the stomach and 
bowels, with systematic derangement, a very little food may 
prove equally detrimental as large quantities swallowed in a 
healthy and hungry state. The digestive process is greatly 
impaired when the animal’s vis vitce is exhausted by previous 
bodily fatigue, and is, in addition, oppressed with the more 
difficult assimilation of flesh, especially after many months 
