506 SCOTTISH METROPOLITAN VETERINARY MEDICAL SOCIETY. 
management; from specific miasmatic or animal poisons, such as those 
generated in localities where large numbers of horses are congregated 
together in camps, barracks, large cab or other establishments, even 
where the stables are well ventilated, lighted, drained, and the animals 
well attended to in every way, but more particularly where the stables 
are ill ventilated, badly drained, dark and foul. Horses, when crowded 
on board ship, are very liable to this affection, and the Arabs in trans¬ 
porting their horses from Arabia to India always choose that part of the 
year when the passage is shortest, lest the accidents incident to a long 
voyage might oblige the hatches to be closed, and want of ventilation 
promote the development of glanders.” The writer continues : “I have 
also observed that glanders is developed in new stables, where the walls 
are not thoroughly dry, where, in fact, in common language, they are 
said ‘ to sweatand, finally, glanders occur as a sequence to exhaust¬ 
ing diseases, more especially if the animal be old or of a bad constitu¬ 
tion. These causes, and a generally vitiated condition of the animal 
system, may be said to produce glanders—(1) By causing the introduc¬ 
tion into the blood of vitiated or decomposing material generated in the 
external surroundings of the animal; (2) by inducing the formation of 
degenerated material within the animal system ; (3) by preventing the 
excretion of the degraded constituents normally generated within it by 
natural tissue changes, or excessively formed within it by various dis¬ 
ordered functions, or introduced into it from without. The most common 
forerunner of glanders, more particularly of that form of it known as 
farcy, is the disease commonly called diabetes insipidus or polyuria. It 
cannot be said that in diabetes there is any obstruction to the excretion 
of degraded tissue; indeed, the reverse is the case, excretion of urine 
being enormously increased. If we look deeper into the matter, we 
shall, however, see the polyuria is but a result of rapid tissue changes, 
rapid emaciation of the body being a most prominent symptom, with 
debility arising from degradation of tissue and from the presence of the 
degraded materials within the circulatory fluid. So apparent is this 
condition that it has been truly said that diabetes, when arising from no 
cognizable cause, is often indicative of a general breaking up of the 
constitution.” 
Now all this long string of supposed causes operating in the produc¬ 
tion of glanders is nothing more or less than mere hypothesis, destitute 
of a single fact to support it. Glanders is not, and cannot be, produced 
by anything save the glander contagium. It is a purely contagious 
disease, and owes its production only to its contagious principle. Not 
one or all of the causes combined will give rise to it, though they may 
favour its evolution when the contagium has been introduced. Among 
horses all my life, and for a quarter of a century in a position to watch 
the genesis of disease, such as falls to the lot of few veterinary surgeons, 
as a result of my experience and close study of this malady in particular, 
I firmly maintain that none of the causes popularly supposed to develop 
glanders will do so. It is mere theory to assert that they can, and the 
existence of such a theory constitutes a standing danger to the public 
interests; for as long as it is accepted so long will the scourge prevail. 
It was the existence of a similar theory which kept zymotic pleuro-pneu- 
monia and foot-and-mouth disease for forty years devastating the country, 
and it is high time it was abandoned with regard to glanders. The 
vitiated, decomposing, or degenerated material theory, the degraded 
constituent notion, is baseless. Glanders is only produced from glanders, 
and nothing else. A soliped will not have the disease unless he is 
infected with it; and the maladies or morbid conditions which are 
