156 
INOOGNIT0S. 
Williams, Hill, Steel, Smith, Liautard, Michener, and many 
others of prominence. And, moreover, it is an established scien¬ 
tific fact, applicable to the cow, as to all other mammalia, and 
explicable by perspicuous physiological axioms, that during the 
forty-eight hours immediately following the act of parturition the 
secretion of urine is greater than during any other equal period 
of health. In the first place, this fact fully accounts for the dis¬ 
tended condition of the bladder at the time the practitioner is 
called, and in the second place, in view of the fact that parturient 
apoplexy seldom occurs within twenty-four hours after parturi¬ 
tion, it precludes the possibility of the blood being “ intoxicated 
with the entire element of the organism which go to make up the 
urine.” 
Taking for granted that, as Billings says, nearly every severe 
case of parturient apoplexy in cows is accompanied by albumin¬ 
uria, and that, as Franck says, it is often present antecedent to par¬ 
turition, that proves absolutely nothing in regard to the etiology 
of the disease. In order to prove the dependence of a disease on 
albuminuria, it is not necessary to prove that it follows every 
case of albuminous urine, but it is necessary to prove that every 
case of the disease be preceded by albumin in the urine; and in 
the disease under consideration even more than that is necessary, 
for very nearly if not quite every case of advanced pregnancy is 
accompanied by a varying increase of albumin in the urine, the 
quantity of which is probably augmented by an attack of par¬ 
turient apoplexy and possibly the more severe the attack the 
greater that augmentation, but the quantity of albumin in the 
urine previous to parturition affords evidence of the probability of 
an attack of parturient apoplexy only so far as it indicates the 
extent of the physiological changes which take place during the 
latter stages of utero-gestation. Albuminuria is a result of ad¬ 
vanced pregnancy and perhaps parturient apoplexy, and no more 
the cause of the latter than of the former. 
The foregoing opinion, relative to the presence of albumin in 
the urine of pregnant cows and its importance as a factor in the 
etiology of parturient apoplexy, is based on personal observations 
and the following physiological laws which favor the production 
