rter should suddenly be cut off by the bite of a mad
dog, he would have signed the warrant of execution of all the packs of
harriers and fox-hounds, all the pointers, spaniels, setters, and
cockers, all the stag-hounds, greyhounds, and lurchers, all the
Newfoundlanders, shepherd-dogs, mastiffs, bull-dogs, and terriers, the
infinite generation of mongrels and crosses included, in Great Britain
and Ireland--to say nothing of the sledge-drawers in Kamtschatka, and in
the realms slow-moving near the Pole? To clench the argument at
once--What are all the old women in Europe, one-half of the men, and
one-third of the children, when compared, in value, with any one of
Christopher North's Newfoundland dogs--Fro--Bronte--or O'Bronte?
Finally, does he include in his sweeping condemnation the whole brute
creation, lions, tigers, panthers, ounces, elephants, rhinoceroses,
hippopotami, camelopardales, zebras, quaggas, cattle, horses, asses,
mules, cats, the ichneumon, cranes, storks, cocks-of-the-wood, geese,
and how-towdies?

"Semi-drowning in the sea"--he continues--"and all the pretended
specifics, are mere delusions--there is no real remedy but cutting the
part out immediately. If the bite be near a blood-vessel, that cannot
always be done, nor when done, however well done, will it always prevent
the miserable victim from dying the most dreadful of deaths. Well might
St Paul tell us to '_beware of dogs_.' First Epistle to Philippians,
chap. iii., v. 2."

Semi-drowning in the sea is, we grant, a bad specific, and difficult to
be administered. It is not possible to tell, _a priori_, how much
drowning any particular patient can bear. What is mere semi-drowning to
James, is total drowning to John;--Tom is easy of resuscitation--Bob
will not stir a muscle for all the Humane Societies in the United
Kingdoms. To cut a pound of flesh from the rump of a fat dowager, who
turns sixteen stone, is within the practical skill of the veriest
bungler in the anatomy of the human frame--to scarify the fleshless
spindle-shank of an antiquated spinstress, who lives on a small annuity,
might be beyond the scalpel of an Abernethy or a Liston. A large
blood-vessel, as the Doctor well remarks, is an awkward neighbour to the
wound made by the bite of a mad dog, "when a new excision has to be
attempted"--but will any Doctor living inform us how, in a thousand
other cases besides hydrophobia, "the miserable victim may always be
prevented from dying?" The