634 WEST OF SCOTLAND VETERINARY MEDICAL ASSOCIATION. 
posing food, noxious exhalations, bad weather, may each be 
classed as exciting causes. 
Another very remote cause, and, perhaps, you will say it is 
very remote, I must mention is this: — Animals suffering 
from intestinal and hepatic tubercle, especially rabbits, which are 
constantly running over pastures, must necessarily pass with 
the feces a large quantity of tubercular matter in various stages 
of development and degeneration; may not this be picked up with 
the grass, and small portions of it become lodged in accidental 
wounds or abrasions of the mouth or throat, especially as we 
know that such abrasions and wounds do frequently exist in 
these situations, and thus by direct inoculation propagate the 
disease ? 
Prevention of Tubercle .—Proper feeding, proper housing, 
careful selection of sires and dams, avoidance of all debilitating 
causes and adulterated or decomposing food, the fattening, if 
possible, or slaughter of animals known to be affected with the 
disease; and here I would say that there are few animals the 
subject of tubercle which ought to be used for human food, no 
matter what the monetary loss may be upon such animals; and 
more particularly than all these, should land's that are known to 
be productive of tubercle be properly drained and carefully 
manured. Various transformations and combinations of elements 
are constantly going on in such lands, and it is reasonable to 
suppose that even the elements of tubercular matter may be gene¬ 
rated in such soils equally as much as the exhalations which give 
rise to the various fevers whose occurrence or prevalence is always 
associated with some peculiarity of climate and soil. If this view 
approaches to even an approximation of the truth, surely it were 
wise to adopt precautionary measures, and, as in the early spring, 
in wet humid seasons succeeding a wet summer and autumn and 
a mild winter, we should have recourse to a top dressing of salt 
or sulphur on land favorable to the development of Filaria 
broncJiialis (and it is my opinion that the transformation, either 
directly or indirectly, of these parasites will ultimately be found 
to go on in the autumn and early spring months in favorable 
seasons and soils), so we should apply disinfecting and anti¬ 
septic manures, such as carbolic acid mixed with lime or sawdust, 
salt, or sulphate of iron, to lands that are known to be favor¬ 
able to the development or production of tubercle or allied 
affections. 
Having thus far, gentlemen, occupied your time, I shall draw 
my paper to a close by various discursory remarks on the subject 
of tubercle. I presume it is quite unnecessary for me to enter 
into the symptoms of pulmonary phthisis in cows, as I doubt not 
you are all well acquainted with them, and the treatment of such 
cases, as a rule, is utterly hopeless, as we are not called in until 
