The winter, beginning in the latter month, is the only period in which Englishmen can hunt on horseback, and they are in danger of losing all their studs some months before December.

To this disease the horse is especially exposed, and it is almost always fatal.

One attack, however, seems to secure immunity from a second.

Cattle, too, are subject to it, but only at intervals of a few, sometimes many years; but it never makes a clean sweep of the whole cattle of a village, as it would do of a troop of fifty horses.

This barrier, then, seems to explain the absence of the horse among the Hottentots, though it is not opposed to the southern migration of cattle, sheep, and goats.
When the flesh of animals that have died of this disease is eaten, it causes a malignant carbuncle, which, when it appears over any important organ, proves rapidly fatal.