CENTRAL VETERINARY MEDICAL SOCIETY. 
733 
his practice, which was principally among draught horses, he frequently 
found fatty degeneration, atrophy, or hypertrophy of the heart. Such 
horses were capable of undergoing great exertion. Indeed, it surprised 
him how they underwent so much with heart disease. 
The Chairman , in calling attention to Mr. Broad’s paper on “ Glanders 
and Farcy,” regretted he had not attended the two previous meetings, 
but he now desired to draw their attention to the length of time the 
disease often laid dormant in the system. One case particularly im¬ 
pressed him. Two horses belonging to a London brewery were turned 
out to grass; one became affected with glanders and was destroyed, 
the other one was left out six weeks or two months. He appeared all 
right when brought up, and was put to work. Ten months after, this 
horse broke out with farcy. He had no proof of it, but felt certain this 
horse contracted the disease while out to grass with the other one and 
became inoculated, and that the disease laid dormant ten months. 
During a period of sixteen years they only had had one case of farcy in 
the stud of sixty horses. The animals had water supplied them in their 
mangers, and to this he mainly attributed their freedom from glanders 
and farcy, as they could obtain drink at night. 
Mr. Shaw said he would like to ask Mr. Broad whether feeding horses 
with maize had anything to do with the disease, as many horses in 
London were fed upon it. 
In reply to Mr. Gerrard the Chairman said he had no positive proof 
the animal he referred to, might not have contracted the disease else¬ 
where than from the horse he was put out to grass with. He would not 
say the poison of glanders always laid dormant in the system for 
so long a time ; very much depended upon the constitution of the animal, 
its freedom from organic disease, and other considerations. He thought 
neither himself nor any one else could determine how soon the disease 
would come on. 
Mr. Gerrard said he believed in the laying on of water in stables. He 
thought drinking-troughs did more harm than good. 
Mr. Samson remarked that, to detect ulcers in the nostril, he used a 
small bull’s-eye lamp, and found it preferable to a candle, which the 
animals frequently extinguished. 
Mr. Hunting said he would refer to one or two topics shortly. As to 
incubation , it was one of the most difficult, and also one of the most 
important points to deal with, the difficulty being that with horses kept 
for work, travelling about town or country, exposed to various conditions, 
it was next to impossible to say how long the period of incubation was. 
In the case mentioned by the Chairman it was impossible to say that the 
horse might not have been contaminated, not at the time he was in the 
field, but a month previous ; such might have been the case. It was 
well known that the period of incubation extended to a considerable 
time. For a certainty he could say it might be as short as eight days in 
direct inoculation, and it might extend (from his own experience in a 
number of cases) to three months. This period of incubation had a very 
important medical-legal bearing. If a man bought a horse, and it be¬ 
came glandered, or showed symptoms of the disease shortly after pur¬ 
chase, it became a question for veterinary surgeons to decide—Was the 
horse glandered or not at the time of sale ? He believed the French 
law required a period of eighteen days to elapse, and if glanders showed 
itself within that time the law held that the animal had glanders in 
its system prior to sale. This seemed a very fair period to allow, and 
such a law would be good for this country. The burden should rest 
Liu. 50 
