VETERINARY SANITARY SCIENCE. 
611 
cag-o, etc. These witnesses all gave essentially the same tes¬ 
timony as to the nature of actinomycosis; that it was due to 
the invasion of the tissues by the ray fungus or actinomyces, 
which was probably obtained originally from vegetable food 
products, and gained entrance into the system through 
wounds, abrasions, glandular openings or very delicate mem¬ 
branes; that it had been transmitted experimentally from ani¬ 
mal to animal and from man to animal; it is contagious, al¬ 
though not highly so, and can, so far as science teaches us at 
present, be as readily transmitted by transplantation of ray 
fungus from animal to animal or animal to man, as by means 
of the same fungus conveyed from a plant to animal or man ; 
that the actinomyces found on vegetation, in the tumors of 
cattle and in actinomycosis of man are all, so far as is known, 
identical. 
Many of the witnesses had made post-mortem examina¬ 
tions of affected cattle, and had found the disease in bones of 
jaws, face and head, in lymphatics of head, throat, thorax, 
deep inguinal region, and those lodged in the intermuscular 
connective tissue of the legs; in the tongue, pharynx, lungs, 
liver, spleen, stomach, bowels, mesentery, prepuce, etc. 
The disease, in their minds, is dangerously contagious, in 
the sense that the life of the affected patient is greatly jeopar¬ 
dized. They believed the disease capable of entering into 
and passing through the lymphatic and haemal circulations, 
and based their conclusion on, first: the size of the club-shaped 
mycelia of the ray fungi (without reckoning the necessarily 
smaller spores which the mycelia bear,) which are not gener¬ 
ally so large as the blood corpuscles, and hence capable of 
passing through the capillaries ; second, the presence of actin¬ 
omyces in the spleen and in heart-walls, etc., where it could 
not well gain admission except through the circulation. The 
external manifestations form no criterion as to internal distri¬ 
bution of the ray fungus, so that an animal with but a small 
external tumor or a mere cicatrix, after undergoing a so-called 
cure, may show distinct evidence of the disease in various in¬ 
ternal organs, and since the parasite is microscopic, it is im¬ 
practicable to say that a portion of an affected animal is free 
