224 SYNOPSIS OP CONTINENTAL VETERINARY JOURNALS. 
more extensively during an outbreak among fowls. It is 
not cholera for it does not present lesions of that affection. 
Could it be a sort of enzootic or epizootic typhus ? We 
attach to the idea of typhus a tendency to dissolution of the 
blood, and very rapid decomposition of the body. But in 
this disease of fowls, in place of dissolution of the blood, 
there is great coagulability. It is only the symptoms which 
are analogous with those of typhus, as stupor, extreme 
debility and prostration ; but it is the lesions not the sym¬ 
ptoms which denote the nature of a disease. In many 
cases, but not in all, the lesions observable are those of 
septicaemia. The cause of the disease is not known , but 
clinical and experimental observations teach us that it is 
due to a virus which is diffused throughout the organism, 
enters the blood, and determines, sooner or later, death of 
affected animals. It is very probable that the temperature 
and certain hygrometrie conditions of the atmosphere are 
favorable to the formation of a stratum suitable for the 
multiplication and development of the virus of this disease; 
but as it is developed as well in warm as in cold seasons, in 
dry as in wet weather, we can give nothing definite concern¬ 
ing this. The cohabitation of healthy animals with sick is 
the cause of contagion. I have succeeded in convincing 
myself of this by direct experimentation. But contact is 
not sufficient, as MM. Renault and Delafond have proved. 
It has been found necessary that healthy fowls should con¬ 
sume food defiled with dejections of diseased animals, or 
with the mucosities from the beak, or that they should drink in 
the same watering place. I have communicated the disease 
to one cock and two hens by making them eat the recent 
ovary and lungs of an animal which died from the epizooty. 
But how is the virus of this disease produced ? Here is a 
question to which we can give no exact answer. But from 
considering the manner in which the disease appears and 
progresses, we may conclude that the cause is specially pro¬ 
duced in fowl houses. Certainly, whilst the disease is 
always mortal when the animals are left collected together 
in fowl houses, we may completely arrest its progress by 
dispersing through the meadows the fowls among which it 
has appeared. Is its virus a contagious miasma similar to 
that which , in stalls , causes anthrax of larger animals ? 
Probably it is §o. I find conditions favorable to its 
appearance in faulty construction of fowl houses which are 
low, moist, and cannot be properly ventilated, in accumula¬ 
tions of faecal matters, which ferment there, putrefy, and 
generate a more or less prejudicial gas, in agglomeration of 
