what they may, is their extreme
abundance, quite out of proportion to the quantity of food taken, and
due to their admixture with the unhealthy secretions from the bowels.
The child next becomes restless and feverish at night, its thirst is
considerable, and the colicky pains become both more severe and more
frequent. Sometimes the stomach grows very irritable, and the food taken
is occasionally vomited, while the tongue, in the early stages of the
affection, continues for the most part clean and moist, and except that
it is often unnaturally red deviates but little from its appearance in
health. Next comes a change in the condition of the belly, the date of
which varies considerably. It becomes larger than natural, owing to the
filling of the bowels with wind, but at the same time it is tense and
tender on pressure--two points of great importance to be noticed, and
the glands in the groin, which in a healthy child cannot be felt, become
enlarged, and are felt and perhaps even seen like tiny beans under the
skin.

As in other forms of consumptive disease, so here the progress from bad
to worse seldom goes on uninterruptedly. Pauses take place in its
course, though each time they become shorter; and signs of amendment now
and then appear, but they too promise less and less with each return.
The child wastes rapidly; is always more or less feverish; the abdomen
is constantly tender, but does not in general go on increasing in size;
the pains become more frequent and more severe, and the bowels are
almost always habitually relaxed. Life is sometimes cut short by the
lungs becoming affected, but when this is not the case the patient may
linger on for weeks, or months, or even for two or three years, until,
worn to a skeleton, death at last takes place from exhaustion.

Much apprehension is often needlessly excited in the minds of parents,
with reference to any child whose digestion is imperfect, who loses
flesh, and has a large abdomen; and the words mesenteric disease,
sometimes uttered thoughtlessly by the doctors, seem to them to seal
their little one's doom. Now, first of all, it must be remembered that
mesenteric disease, due to consumption, plays but a very small part in
the production of the symptoms just described, but that the covering and
the lining of the bowels are chiefly involved. Next, enlargement of the
mesenteric glands and disorder of their functions take place from many
causes other than consumption. The