The Fat Is Of A Greenish-Yellow Color And Of An Oily Consistence.
All The Muscles Are Flabby, And The Heart Often So Soft That The Fingers
May Be Made To Meet Through It.
The lungs and liver partake of the disease.
The stomach and bowels are pale and empty, and the gall-bladder is distended
with bile.
These symptoms seem to indicate what is probably the case,
a poison in the blood, the germ of which enters when the proboscis
is inserted to draw blood. The poison-germ, contained in a bulb
at the root of the proboscis, seems capable, although very minute in quantity,
of reproducing itself, for the blood after death by tsetse
is very small in quantity, and scarcely stains the hands in dissection.
I shall have by-and-by to mention another insect, which by the same operation
produces in the human subject both vomiting and purging.
The mule, ass, and goat enjoy the same immunity from the tsetse
as man and the game. Many large tribes on the Zambesi can keep
no domestic animals except the goat, in consequence of the scourge
existing in their country. Our children were frequently bitten,
yet suffered no harm; and we saw around us numbers of zebras,
buffaloes, pigs, pallahs and other antelopes, feeding quietly
in the very habitat of the tsetse, yet as undisturbed by its bite as oxen are
when they first receive the fatal poison. There is not so much difference
in the natures of the horse and zebra, the buffalo and ox,
the sheep and antelope, as to afford any satisfactory explanation
of the phenomenon. Is a man not as much a domestic animal as a dog?
The curious feature in the case, that dogs perish though fed on milk,
whereas the calves escape so long as they continue sucking,
made us imagine that the mischief might be produced by some plant
in the locality, and not by tsetse; but Major Vardon, of the Madras Army,
settled that point by riding a horse up to a small hill infested by the insect
without allowing him time to graze, and, though he only remained long enough
to take a view of the country and catch some specimens of tsetse
on the animal, in ten days afterward the horse was dead.
The well-known disgust which the tsetse shows to animal excreta,
as exhibited when a village is placed in its habitat,
has been observed and turned to account by some of the doctors.
They mix droppings of animals, human milk, and some medicines together,
and smear the animals that are about to pass through a tsetse district;
but this, though it proves a preventive at the time, is not permanent.
There is no cure yet known for the disease. A careless herdsman
allowing a large number of cattle to wander into a tsetse district
loses all except the calves; and Sebituane once lost
nearly the entire cattle of his tribe, very many thousands, by unwittingly
coming under its influence.
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