tion they keep up, worry and fatigue the animals, and effectually prevent them from thriving. Eric Viborg states that these vermin sometimes burrow their way into the flesh and come out through the eyes, nostrils, or mouth, or have even been known to be voided in the urine.
The first step to be taken towards effecting a cure is thoroughly to cleanse the skin from every particle of dirt, and to clean out and whitewash the styes and put in fresh dry litter.
Mercurial ointment, turpentine, or tobacco-water, are the most efficient agents in the destruction of these unwelcome parasites. A little sulphur or Ethiop's mineral and bay-salt may be given internally.
The preventive means are strict attention to cleanliness both in the styes and in the animals themselves. Whenever a pig is observed to be lousy, which will quickly be perceived by his rubbing himself against the gates, trees, and walls, he must be immediately separated from his companions, or they too will become infested with lice, if they are not already so.
Parkinson is of opinion that "the cause of vermin infesting animals clearly arises, in a general way, from bad feeding, which occasions weakness of the blood; for," says he, "if an animal be ever so lousy, by giving him strong food for a few days the vermin will disappear, probably because the rich blood is poison to them." He considers that a free access to water for bathing, and also occasional exposure to heavy rain, is not only necessary to the general health of swine, but a most excellent preservative against vermin.
LEPROSY.
This disease has apparently existed in swine from the remotest periods, and Tacitus gives it as his opinion that it was because the hog was subject to leprosy that the Jews were forbidden to eat of its flesh. It consists in the development of certain vesicles, or whitish granulations, in all parts and portions of the cellular tissue; which vesicles have been proved to be neither more nor less than a species of worms termed the cysticercus cellulosa, supposed by some French authors to be of the same species as that found in the brain of sheep. There are however considerable differences between these two. The cysticercus is found in all the cellular tissues and soft parts throughout the whole of the body; in the fat, in the adipose matter, in the interstices between the muscles, in the viscera, and, in short, in every crevice into which they can insert themselves. The thigh or ham has been mentioned by some authors as the principal seat of these vesicles, but they are also found on the shoulders, around the jaws, along the neck and belly, and even underneath and around the root
