328 
APPENDIX,- D. 
dog-days probably owe their names to the fancied prevalence 
of it then.* But it is now sufficiently notorious that rabies is not 
more common at one season than another.t 
“ The quality and quantity of the food has been assigned as a 
cause of rabies; but in dogs which have been accidentally sub¬ 
jected to a deprivation of food, bordering upon starvation, it 
never yet took place. Neither has repletion ever occasioned 
it, although it has proved the parent of many other inflammatory 
affections. Putrid food has been fully proved to have no title 
to generating it; neither would it, a priori , be likely to produce 
it in predatory animals, whose stomachs must, by nature, be 
forced to subsist on matter in various stages of decomposition. 
In Lisbon, in Constantinople, and other Eastern cities, dogs 
are the only scavengers; and, at the Cape of Good Hope 
Barrow informs us, the Caffres feed their dogs wholly on pu¬ 
trid flesh, and no such disease is seen among them. Absti¬ 
nence from water is an old and popular supposed cause of 
madness; but, in India, where, from the drying of the water- 
tanks, many brutes perish, and in Northern latitudes, where 
the supplies are frozen, yet madness is not observed to be the 
consequence of either. In fact, in the rage for experiment, 
dogs have been purposely subjected to all these supposed 
Causes, but without having once produced the disease. It is 
unnecessary to combat the opinion of Dr. Mead and others, 
that an acrid state of blood, from the want of perspiration in 
the dog, is a remote cause of madness. Neither have we more 
reason to suppose that any state or peculiarity of atmosphere 
* This is an error: they are called dog-days because of the predominance of 
the star “ Sirius”—the dog-star of the ancients. 
t It is perhaps well here to observe, that in the coldest winter weather at 
Quebec, and throughout Upper Canada, hydrophobia is at least as prevalent as 
in the hot weather. The same is notorious of New York, although we never 
hear of boys being carefully indoctrinated into cruelty and brutality, and 
trained toward future murder, by decree of the City Fathers at Christmas, 
though at that period, rewards for dog-slaughter are just as much required as 
in July. 
