s to moan,--the pulse becomes small, wiry, and
intermittent. At length labor comes on, and is often attended with much
difficulty and danger.

If the abortion has been caused by blows or violence, whether from
brutality, or the animal's having been teased by other cows in season,
or by oxen, the symptoms are more intense. The animal suddenly ceases to
eat and to ruminate--is uneasy, paws the ground, rests her head on the
manger while she is standing, and on her flank when she is lying
down--hemorrhage frequently comes on from the uterus, or when this is
not the case the mouth of that organ is spasmodically contracted. The
throes come on, are distressingly violent, and continue until the womb
is ruptured. If all these circumstances be not observed, still the labor
is protracted and dangerous.

Abortion is sometimes singularly frequent in particular districts, or on
particular farms, appearing to assume an epizooetic or epidemic form.
This has been accounted for in various ways. Some have imagined it to be
contagious. It is, indeed, destructively propagated among the cows, but
this is probably to be explained on a different principle from that of
contagion. The cow is a considerably imaginative animal, and highly
irritable during the period of pregnancy. In abortion, the foetus is
often putrid before it is discharged; and the placenta, or after-birth,
rarely or never follows it, but becomes decomposed, and, as it drops
away in fragments, emits a peculiar and most noisome smell. This smell
seems to be peculiarly annoying to the other cows: they sniff at it and
then run bellowing about. Some sympathetic influence is exercised on
their uterine organs, and in a few days a greater or less number of
those that had pastured together likewise abort. Hence arises the
rapidity with which the foetus is usually taken away and buried
deeply, and far from the cows; and hence the more effectual preventive
of smearing the parts of the cow with tar or stinking oils, in order to
conceal or subdue the smell; and hence, too, the inefficacy, as a
preventive, of removing her to a far-distant pasture.

The pastures on which the blood or inflammatory fever is most prevalent
are those on which the cows oftenest slink their calves. Whatever can
become a source of general excitation and fever is likely, during
pregnancy, to produce inflammation of the womb; or whatever would, under
other circumstances, excite inflammation of almost any organ, has