202 
EDITORIAL. 
and consists in the change of voice of the diseased animal, wliic 
literally condemns himself out of his own mouth. No one wli 
has ever heard the peculiar rabid bark , will fail to recognize tl: 
sound when again heard. Independently of this, the general sui 
of the symptoms, the' characteristic changes, the progressiv 
paralysis, and the final termination of all in the closing seer 
within the brief period of from forty-eight hours to four day 
are too generally comprehended, and have become too familiarl 
known, as they have been observed and described by Flemirn 
Youatt, Bouley, Galtier and many others, to have room for tl 
slightest shade of doubt in the mind of a professional man calle 
to pronounce upon a case. 
If, however, such is the case in the diagnosis of rabies durin 
life, while the paroxysm, the progress and the mode of death ( 
the patient are specific and characteristic , the same cannot b 
affirmed in reference to the cadaver of an animal dead or kille 
under suspicion of laboring under the disease. The condition c 
the fauces and of the digestive apparatus, the sometimes abser 
lesions of the nervous centers, the peculiar aspect of the abdomim 
organs, the presence of foreign substances in the stomach, and th 
state of the urinary apparatus, which according to some authoritie 
always presents the special feature of an empty bladder, we 
retracted into the pelvic cavity—all these lesions have in man 
instances been the only means of reading a diagnosis, and howeve 
carefully the inquiry may have been made, there has been groun 
for doubt as to the positive nature of the natural or artifick 
cause of death. 
In the year 1881, however, during the investigations conducte 
by Pasteur in relation to hydrophobia, for the determination o 
its nature, character, method and history, that learned chemist wa 
brought to the conclusion that not only the virulent element o 
rabies existed in the nervous system, in the brain and in th 
medulla, but that by the operation of cerebral inoculation of thi 
infected nervous matter, lie would in a short time develop rabie 
under various forms. His communication was important to al 
who looked at this result, but to the veterinarian, from any poin 
of view, upon whom the decision of the question arising in th 
