REPORT ON DISEASES OF DOMESTIC ANIMALS. 
231 
ECZEMATOUS (APHTHOUS) FEVER IN ANIMALS. 
Although this disease is communicable to man in a mild form, 
and to infants who live on the fresh milk in the form of a violent 
and even fatal inflammation, yet, as it has at present no foothold 
on this continent, and, like rinderpest, sheep-pox, douriue, quebra 
bunda, &c., may be easily excluded by inspection and quarantine 
at our ports, it will be best to leave it with the purely animal 
plagues to the control of a veterinary sanitary bureau, and thus 
avoid the multiplying of inspectors. 
TYPHOID FEVER IN SUCKING CALVES. 
Reports have lately been published of the occurrence of this 
disease in calves, and of the infection of a number of persons 
that have eaten of the veal; it seems very desirable, therefore, 
that experiments should be instituted to ascertain whether animals 
kept on an exclusively milk diet are susceptible to this infection 
of man. It seems altogether probable that a mistake has been 
made and that the calves and their victims died of trichiniasis, 
intestinal anthrax, or of some other poison common to man and 
animals; but it should at least be shown by the National Health 
Board that the danger of the alleged transmission of typhoid fever 
is altogether fanciful. 
TRICHINIASIS. 
The life-history of the trichina spiralis is now fairly under¬ 
stood. The parasite is harbored by very many mammalia and 
probably even by reptiles, but is, above all, common in rats, pigs, 
and men. It has its two principal stages of existence—the sexu¬ 
ally mature form, which lives and propagates its kind in the in¬ 
testines only, and the immature asexual form, which, born in the 
intestines, bores its way through their walls and into the voluntary 
muscles, where it encysts itself. These last attain maturity only 
when their host is devoured by a carnivorous animal, and when 
the cyst is digested off so as to set the imprisoned trichina free. 
A third habitat may be named for those embryos that have been 
carried out of the system by the prevailing diarrhoea ere they have 
