680 WEST OF SCOTLAND VETERINARY MEDICAL ASSOCIATION. 
generation like any other morbid virus, i. e . if all circumstances 
are favorable to its production. I know there are those who deny 
the possibility of this phenomenon taking place under any con¬ 
ditions or with any disease. Let us consider the matter:— 
Is it, or is it not, an immutable law that when two or three 
elements are brought together in certain proportions, and under 
certain conditions, life is the result? What of the virus of 
pysemic pus which has been so recently produced and modified in 
intensity, from healthy pus by Dr. Burdon Sanderson ? What 
of the virus of rabies—a principle isomeric with many harmless 
agents: impalpable, imponderable, imperceptible, immensurable, 
and undefined, yet terribly destructive in itself when it meets 
with a suitable pabulum ? What of the production of blennorrhoea 
in cows that have never come in contact with one of their own 
species, as has been proved in my own practice in several 
instances, by becoming developed as a result of the acrid discharges 
following parturition ? I say most positively that, under certain 
peculiar conditions of the system, the glands of the mucous 
membrane take on a morbid action, and spontaneous blennorrhoea 
results. If matter under peculiar circumstances ignites, it is 
called spontaneous combustion , though the actual flame was never 
there; so when the unition of certain elements in a system 
produce a morbid virus tending or giving rise to a specific 
disease, it is none the less spontaneous generation. 
Whence came the first of the numerous contagious diseases 
with which we are acquainted? Is not the same Power in 
existence now to bring fresh cases of peculiar and hitherto 
unknown diseases into the world as heretofore ? How many of 
the diseases which now exist were unknown only a few generations 
ago ? How is it that in splenic apoplexy—a disease engendered, 
as you all know, by peculiarities of land, season, and climate—we 
have the flesh of animals, which die from it, undergoing such 
alterations as to cause certain death to other animals feeding upon 
it ? And how is it that a horse may at one time have simple 
cracked heel which is benign and un-inoculable in its character, 
whilst at another a disease is generated in the same limb capable 
of producing by inoculation a contagious and well-defined affec¬ 
tion in other animals P 1 As also in carbuncular anthrax, in which 
affection the very fluids on coming in contact with the skin of 
man produce extensive disease, and frequently death ? 
Is Tubercle Congenital ? —I think this, in the absence of 
absolute proofs is very questionable; at any rate, I have never 
1 Paget, p. 373:—“A man had inflammation of the lymphatics of the 
arm, and of the glands of the axilla, on board ship, as the result of ail injury 
from a beef-bone; he died. The sailor who washed his clothes followed, 
and nearly all on board had similar diffused cellular inflammation, in¬ 
flammation of lymphatic glands, or low fever. 
