harging its contents
and leaving behind a wound which again constitutes a cutaneous quittor.
Thus, as with simple coronitis, anything lowering the vitality of the
parts, and so favouring infection of the skin, may bring about a quittor.
Walking through much water in the winter months, through the dirt and mud
of our streets, through melting ice and snow, or through anything in the
nature of a chemical irritant, may be looked upon as a cause.

_Symptoms_.--Whether commencing from an ascertainable injury, or beginning
at first unnoticed, cutaneous quittor is characterized sooner or later by
the appearance of an inflammatory swelling, usually confined to the seat of
injury. Heat and tenderness are present, and the animal is lame.

Later the inflammatory swelling becomes more profuse, the animal is
fevered, and the symptoms of lameness increased. Poulticing is at this
stage perhaps resorted to. By its means the process of suppuration is
aided, and the swelling (at first tense and hard) either becomes gradually
softened, its contents discharged, and a simple abscess cavity left behind,
or the suppuration runs immediately round the necrosed structures, and
casts them off bodily as a slough. This latter condition is always
manifested, where the hair does not hide it, by the colour of the skin. At
first this is only red in colour--the angry red of an inflamed spot. As its
intention to slough away becomes evident, the red gradually gives way to a
gray, or even blue-black appearance, while from around it oozes a slight
discharge of pus, yellow in colour and non-offensive, or blood-stained and
dark in appearance, and foetid to the smell.

Almost invariably these symptoms are added to by a more or less diffuse and
oedematous swelling of the lower portion of the limb, extending in some
cases to as high as the fetlock or the upper third of the cannon.

With the casting off of the slough the phenomena of inflammation to a great
extent subside, the pain ceases, and the case under ordinary conditions
commences to mend.

_Pathological Anatomy_.--In its early stages the condition of simple or
cutaneous quittor is really a condition of acute coronitis (see p. 229),
and consists in an inflammation of the subcutaneous tissue, and the more
superficial portions of the coronary cushion. The tissues implicated are
destroyed outright, become infiltrated with the inflammatory exudate and
escaped blood, and act as a source of irritation to the s