701 TRANSLATIONS FROM CONTINENTAL JOURNALS. 
of others wliich arc found in works treating of this ques¬ 
tion. How can any one believe wliat is stated l)v certain 
V ^ 
authors, sucli as Sacco, for instance, who tells you almost 
at every page of wonders which, if they do not show a want of 
veracity, which I will not even suspect, prove how easily he 
collected facts, and how slightly he observed the numerous 
cases he has reported. This has led Sacco to believe in the 
uniformity of the virus which produced in man, and in almost 
all domestic animals, an affection of the same essence, but 
invested with cxtremelv varied forms or characters. He was 
therefore never at a loss to find the vaccine. The variola in 
man and several animals, the vaccine in the cow, the variola 
in the sheep, the furuncle and the' grease in the horse, the 
strangles in the same animal, the distemper in the dog, fur¬ 
nished him in abundance. This imaginary uniformity of virus 
he considered the vaccinal essence, an universal panacea, 
capable, by inoculation, of preventing all the maladies which 
I have mentioned. He pretends that this idea arose from 
observation, and that it has been confirmed by experi¬ 
ment. He would thus have rendered immense services 
even to small domestic animals, for in his translation Dr. 
Daquin states, in a note, that in an epizootic, the distemper 
in the dog, the malady propagated itself to cats, ducks, 
turkeys, and more particularly to cocks and hens. The idea 
of a uniformity of a variolous essence, common to several 
animals and man, but in a moderated form, is reasonable 
enough, because it applies only to a malady observed 
in man and in a small number of animals, and having a true 
analogy with each other, has been accepted to a certain extent 
by medical men of great merit and erudition. It will 
suffice to mention our honoured colleagues M^M. Bousquet 
and Depaul. M. Bousquet has told us that he belie.ved 
that the variola and the vaccine were the same maladv. !M. 
* 
Depaul has gone further; he has stated that in his 
opinion all general eruptive, pustulous maladies of the 
several species of animals which had an analogy in their 
general characters with the smallpox in man, were in all 
probability of the same essence, differing only in their forms ; 
and consequently he could understand their transmission 
from one species to another. Thus it was not repugnant to 
him to admit the variola of the horse, of the sheep, of the 
dog, &c., to the cow, and even to man, as the transmission of 
the vaccine is admitted at the present time; and it is only 
in this way that we can accept as correct in all its bearings 
the case of Toulouse, because 1 m 3 believes that the mare 
which furnished the virus to M. Lafosse was affected with 
