Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/512

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508
THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.
Fig. 1. Exterior of the Laboratory Building of Comparative Pathology of the Zoological Society of Philadelphia.

sent me some excellent photographs of pathological specimens prepared at his laboratory and obtained from animals which have died at the Philadelphia Zoological Garden. These are very instructive, indeed; but, much as I regret the fact, they can not well he used in the present connection.

It was in 1901 that pathological work upon the animals that died at the Zoo was inaugurated, and this at the instance of Dr. Charles B. Penrose, of Philadelphia, who had as advisers in the matter the late Dr. Leonard Pearson, of the Pennsylvania Veterinary Department, and Dr. M. P. Ravenel, of the State Stock Sanitary Board.

The first pathologist to the garden was Dr. C. Y. White, assistant director of the William Pepper Laboratory of Clinical Medicine, in which laboratory the post mortems were done.

We learn from the Thirty-first Annual Report of the Board of Directors of the Zoological Society (1903) that no fewer that seventy-six different species of mammals had there been examined with the view of ascertaining the cause of their death, and the result of the autopsies recorded (pp. 20-25). A large number of these mammals were various species of monkeys, apes and their allies (Primates), and the great majority of these succumbed to general tuberculosis.

Besides this much-dreaded malady, these animals suffered from twenty-five other diseases of which they were the victims; this does not