132 LIVERPOOL VETERINARY MEDICAL ASSOCIATION. 
undoubted facts of the disease, and with the established principles 
of physiology. 
Now, if congestion of the brain and this attendant phenomena 
of acute anaemia can occur in ruminants, with a special pro¬ 
vision as it were against it, why does it not occur in solipedes 
where the vascular arrangement is such as to allow of a more 
rapid ingress of blood to the organ? 
In the mare the process of parturition is suddenly accomplished 
in natural labour, and the involution of the uterus more rapid 
even than in the cow; therefore, according to the theory of 
aortic pressure and anatomical conformation, we should expect to 
find congestion, oedema, acute anaemia, and all its attendant 
phenomena in her, but we do not. 
Nor do we find parturient apoplexy in the ewe, even although 
she possesses the anatomical peculiarities of the cow in a more 
pronounced form, and the parturient process quickly and easily 
performed. Even in the sow, where Mr. Fleming says the rete 
mirabile is greatly developed, I have never seen, nor heard, nor 
read of a case of parturient apoplexy bearing any resemblance to 
that in the cow. Indeed, I never knew that it did occur in them 
until I read it in the 'Veterinary Obstetrics/ but this you will 
set down to my having seen little pig-practice. Not so, however, 
for I live in a pig-producing county, and have a fair amount of 
parturient practice in them, and I have never seen a case. 
I may mention that I have frequently seen in them what he says 
Ellenbesger aud Wostendorf designate “parturient eclampsia” 
where the appetite is lost, persistent lying and refusing to allow 
the young to suckle, elevated temperature, bowels constipated, 
and the suppression of the lacteal secretion, but I never saw any 
convulsions, or loss of sensibility, or anything approaching the 
eclampsia of women as described in the Rosenberg-Traube theory. 
And, again, it is a well-known fact that in cows killed while 
labouring under this disease the blood is very plastic and very 
plentiful, so that the statement that it is hydraemic in them and 
conduces to this disease requires some qualification or explana¬ 
tion ; for the appearance it presents suggests the idea that it has 
been flowing through the body without being properly deprived 
of its arterial character, instead of being more diluted by the 
pregnant state, expressing the existence, as it were, of an extensive 
vaso motor paralysis. 
The blood of the mare may, I think, be considered more 
watery even than that of the cow, if we may judge from a 
comparison of their milk, and this, taken in connection with 
the fact of the parturient act being more rapid and easy in the 
former, goes far to show that parturient apoplexy would be 
more likely to occur in them if the anaemic theory be true. And 
