CLINICAL ARTICLES. 261 an attack, I had the mare first affected taken out to exercise; to do this she was taken by the window in which the young horse was stabled. Seeing the mare go by, the young horse, as a horse that is fresh and above himself will do, commenced to play and kick up his heels in the box. The result of this was, that in less time than it takes to write it, he \vas attacked with what appeared to be spasm of the larynx. The screams in the struggle for breath could be heard a

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... distance away. He dropped on the floor of the box in agony, and in two minutes was bathed in sweat; I, with nothing better at hand, took an ordinary pocket operating knife out of my pocket to perform tracheotomy, but Mr L. said he \vould be better directly, and so he was; in a few minutes he was on his legs again, eating hay out of the rack, as if nothing had happened, except for the sweating. The same evening my assistant put a tube in this horse's trachea, and he apparently did \vell for a week or two, but was found dead in his box one morning; there had evidently been considerable struggling, and the tube had become displaced. The other horses died in a similar way. The last one attacked Mr L. turned out in a field to take his luck, and he says the horse appeared to have quite recovered, and played and galloped about the field perfectly natural. After a time his owner went himself to fetch the horse in to do some work, but, walking him along the road, he was again attacked in a similar manner, and so was once more taken back to the field. Nothing was subsequently seen wrong with him, until about ten days after he was found dead. Together with Mr Malcolm, Birmingham, I made a post-mortem examination; except dark discoloration of the mucous lining membrane of the larynx, trachea, and adjacent parts, and early decomposition, nothing special \vas noted. The parts named and others were sent to Professor M'Fadyean, and he, except that the horse's larynx gave evidence of the animal having been a roarer, detected nothing abnormal, and considered that the discoloration and early decomposition were such as might have been expected in an animal that had died from asphyxia. Such is an incomplete history of what to me is an extraordinary series of cases, for which I can give no intelligible reason. Briefly, seven horses, apparently healthy and under favourable conditions, are attacked with variola equina in a severe form. Subsequently, and following on this attack, four of them die from what I should term laryngismus spaslllodicus.