ECZEMA EPIZOOTICA. 383 
people who milked diseased cows having the eruption on their 
arms, and sometimes in the mouth. 
Hadinger, of Namiest, Moravia, in 1865, published his 
researches into the nature of eczema epizootica. With the 
microscope, employing a magnifying power of 700 diameters, 
he constantly found a cryptogamous plant on the vesicles of 
the mouth,in the white matter that covered the ulcers, whether 
these were in that orifice, or on the mammse or feet. He also 
observed it in the saliva and the discharge from the affected 
limbs. His investigations led him to the conclusion that this 
fungus, which appears as a conical ramifying body covered 
with spores, was identical with i\\erust of plants, and that the 
aphthae might be originally due to animals eating this dis¬ 
eased vegetation. He noticed that the malady, in traversing 
a country, travelled in zones, and that in the localities where 
it broke out the vegetation was much altered by rust. When 
a speck of this discoloration was microscopically examined, it 
was seen that it consisted only of vegetable tissue, dying or 
already dead, with fissures on its surface containing these 
cryptogamic growths, which, when favoured by heat and 
humidity, became enormously developed, and spread rapidly 
as much towards the periphery as into the substance of the 
plant. In animals it was the same fungus, only more highly 
developed; and numerous experiments proved that, to induce 
the aphthous disease in the mouth or feet, it was only neces¬ 
sary to introduce a leaf covered with the parasite, either 
beneath the tongue or into the interdigital space. 
The vegetable closely resembled the Oidium albicans, the 
fungus that produces the stomatitis or millet of children, 
and the same disease in calves, lambs, and kids; it was 
of a cylindro-couical form, with roots, branches, and spores. 
The roots were cylindrical, translucent tubes, and penetrated 
gradually, not only the somewhat thick layer of epithelial 
cells covering the mucous membrane, but also the entire 
substance of the membrane, as it did in the plant it infected. 
Its branches, which extended in large ramifications on the 
epithelium, carried at the free extremity of each filament, as 
also sometimes at their point of bifurcation, a great number 
of spores. It is when this cryptogam takes root in the mucous 
membrane of the mouth, or in the skin of the interdigital 
space, and over which it spreads by multiplication, that the 
characteristic symptoms of aphthous fever declare themselves. 
So long as it remains only on the surface of the epithelium, 
it scarcely produces more than a simple mechanical irritation, 
with increased heat and abundant secretion; but when the 
roots have passed through the epithelium, there is congestion : 
