indication of ill health, and in such a case the examination of the individual animal can give no guarantee whatever. Even a careful examination of the entire herd may reveal nothing though the seeds of the plague are present, and it is only a series of examinations of the entire herd extending over the period of the longest incubation (90 to 112 days) that can give an assurance of safety. The owner of the herd infected with this plague is subjected to the constant temptation to turn off, at a fair sound price, animals that he knows will almost certainly fall victims to the pestilence and by the long period of incubation after the animal has taken in the germs of the disease, and during which no sign of their presence can be detected, he is furnished with the amplest opportunity to make such sale without suspicion. While there are many who would scorn to take advantage of such an opportunity, every community contains many who would be only too easily overcome, and it is a sound principle in government that seeks to preserve the weak by removing the temptation. But if the temptation is great for the stock owner, it is even more so for the dealer. His training to buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest, places the bait in exact parallelism with his daily habits of mind, and with him it requires a special effort to shut his eyes to the advantage and to turn his attention to less remunerative trade. Moreover, he is specially exempt from the risk of suspicion of evil designs; none can charge back upon him that he knew all the circumstances of the case, for did he not risk his own money in the purchase, and would he have imperilled that and his own reputation in knowingly possessing himself of unsound stock. He can argue that had the cattle been from his own herd, and had the existence of infection been known to him, he would have declined to dispose of them, but that he is not to be held responsible for the action of another who has wronged him in imposing upon him worthless and noxious animals.

Encysted Masses in the Apparently Recovered.

b. Cattle that have apparently recovered from the Lung Plague too often carry in their chests dead and encysted masses of diseased lung, which are really masses of infecting material, and it is often six, eight or twelve months before these are entirely liquefied and removed. Such animals may look well, feed well, milk well, and even gain flesh, and are yet exceedingly dangerous if placed in sound herds. From such herds sales are likely to be made with the most upright intentions. It has been, perhaps, six months since any sickness has been shown, and the owner naturally con-cludes that all the survivors have fully recovered and that they may be disposed of with perfect safety. But the animal with an encysted mass in the chest, which has proved harmless in a herd which has passed through the disease and acquired an immunity for itself, is not always innocuous to sound and susceptible cattle, and we have repeatedly seen instances of such animals proving the centres of new outbreaks in hitherto sound herds and districts. To guard against such evil consequences it becomes absolutely necessary to stop all movement of cattle save under the conditions mentioned, and above all to stop all markets and miscellaneous congregations of cattle, and to abolish all sale (dealer's) stables save the bonded inspection yards. within the infected area.

DANGER OF INFECTION OF THE WEST.

3d. The greatest danger in connection with this disease is that of its transmission to our Western stock raising districts. This is liable to occur any day in connection with the shipment of a thoroughbred sire to those plains for the improvement of the native stock. The danger of this increases daily, in proportion to the increase of the infected area in the East, of the number of thoroughbred herds in the infected districts capable of furnishing such sires; of the extent of railroad, and the number

of cars used for moving (infected) cattle in that area; of the number of infected herds in such districts living in barns with hay that may be afterwards sold to supply food for such thoroughbreds on their passage west, and of the number of attendants on sick cattle in the East, who may any day pack their infected clothing and start out west only to seek employment in tending other herds, and to convey the infection to cattle on the plains. The infection will cling to a building for three months; how much more will it cling to clothing that is closely packed in a box for three days! It is a recognized principle that the more closely a virus is secluded from the air the more certainly is its virulence preserved. Hence, in preserving vaccine matter, we enclose it in hermetically sealed tubes, or if preserved on ivory points they are closely wrapped up in sheet lead. Typhoid fever poison is preserved and even intensified when confined in unventilated sewers, cess-pools and privy vaults, whereas it is soon rendered harmless by the action of the air. Yellow fever is often communicated through the impure products in the almost hermetically sealed holds of ships, and attacks the hands employed in unloading, though the sailors who have slept in the partially ventilated cabins and forecastle have entirely escaped. Typhus has long been known as the fever of close, foul and unventilated jails. Measles and Scarlatina is often confined to a single member of a family living in spacious rooms, into which the air is freely admitted, but attacks all susceptible subjects in small, low-roofed, close, unventilated apartments. Smallpox virus is preserved indefinitely in closely packed clothing, and even in graves, but is quickly disinfected in the free air. Tuberculosis is so likely to become general in close, ill-ventilated dwellings, that it has been attributed by many to rebreathed air. Pasteur has shown that chicken cholera virus increases its virulence as it is cultivated in a limited amount of air, and becomes finally harmless if cultivated in free air. Buchner has reached the same conclusion in the case of Bacteridian Anthrax (Bloody Murrain).

My experiments on Hog Cholera have shown a very high mortality, if the virus used for innoculation had been kept partially secluded from air, but a reduced virulence and fatality according as air had been freely admitted to the culture liquids. Even in the innoculated Lung Plague itself the results vary according as the virus has been used fresh from the diseased lung, or kept for some time in closely sealed bottles or hermetically closed tubes. In the latter case the swelling is liable to be unusually extensive and multiple, and fatal results are far more common. It should be added that recent research is claimed to have detected, in the Lung Plague blood and exudations, the spherical germs described a quarter of a century ago by Dr. Wilhems, the originator of innoculation. The presence of such a microphyte would assimilate this to the other Bacteridian diseases-Chicken Cholera, Bacteridian Anthrax, and Bacteridian Swine Plague, and would a priori imply the great danger of shutting up the virus in any tightly closed space and of thereby preserving it. The clothes of cattle attendants saturated with the virulent products and packed in a trunk for conveyance elsewhere would afford one of the most promising methods of conveying the infection to a distance.

The danger of the propagation of this plague to the Western States has been unspeakably increased in the course of the past year, by the shipment of calves and yearlings from our Eastern Dairies to the markets of Chicago, Kansas City, &c., for distribution in the adjacent States. In our Eastern Dairies the calf is usually considered a source of loss by reason of its consumption of valuable milk. The slaughter (Deaconing) of the calf has therefore been long and extensively practiced. Now, however, it has been discovered that such calves may be profitably raised in the West to consume the rich vegetation of the Mississippi Valley, and that the animal bought for little more than the price of its hide can be returned to the East in three years worth $60 to $80. This offers a valuable source of revenue to the West, and accordingly

this trade in its first year (1880) is alleged to have amounted to from 40,000 to 50,000 head. In view of the heavy losses from severe winter, the Western dealers in this class of stock are anxiously urging renewed shipments in the present year, and unless absolutely prohibited there is reason to fear the trade during the coming season will far exceed that of a year ago. While our shipments of cattle from the seaboard to the Western States was confined to thoroughbred stock there was some seeming guarantee of protection in the special care given to this class of animal, but with the newly started traffic in common stock even this slender support fails us and we must realize the presence of a peril which is at once imminent and overwhelming. Calves are of less value in the milk dairies of the Eastern cities than in the country, and the freight to the West is also lower from the first named points, so that the criminal negligence of our legislators has invited an evil which cannot well be exaggerated.

WESTERN INFECTION EQUAL TO GENERAL INFECTION.

4th. The infection of our great cattle-raising district west of the Mississippi will entail the permanent infection of the entire country. Let the infection be once conveyed to Texas or the Plains and it will speedily spread over all those great unfenced territories as it has done in similar conditions in all parts of the world—in Asia, Europe, South Africa and Australia. Even around our large Eastern cities the disease has been mainly preserved for thirty-six years by reason of the promiscuous pasturage of the dairy cows on the unbuilt lots and unfenced commons around those cities. These have repeated on a small scale the historic experience of the different countries named on their comparatively boundless open pastures. Often has this affection been carried out to agricultural districts, where the cattle were kept in inclosed pastures at a great distance from all other animals, and as often have such outbreaks died out spontaneously when all the stock had been infected, the subsidence having been simply from lack of fresh and susceptible subjects. Even around our large infected cities the plague is always more extensively prevalent at the end of Summer, after the yearly mingling on the open pastures, than at the end of Winter, when they have been long secluded in separate buildings. Such a fact shows forcibly the immense influence of this one cause in perpetuating and diffusing the infection. It is further notorious that this plague has made the greatest headway southward, through New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia, or in other words it has extended where it could find numbers of small towns surrounded by open commons, or unbuilt lots, where the cattle of different herds are accustomed to mingle freely.

INFECTION OF THE PLAINS IRREMEDIABLE.

5th. No attempts to eradicate the pestilence can prove satisfactory so long as the cows of such cities are allowed to graze promiscuously on the commons referred to. Our experience on this point in New York has been most instructive. In New York City, where, with the assistance of the Police Commissioners, a sound pasturage law was enforced, the disease was definitely extinguished, whereas in Brooklyn, where the ill-advised Aldermen and Magistrates acted in a manner most inimical to the maintenance of such a law, it was found that the slaughter of the sick and the disinfection of the premises was utterly inadequate to stamp out the pestilence. In New Jersey, too, where General Sterling was unable to enforce a sound pasturage law, but where, around the infected cities the cattle of different owners continued to mingle on the commons no such effective work has been accomplished as was done by us in New York City, Suffolk, Queens and Putnam, in which such a law was rigidly enforced. These are but repetitions of the experience of centuries in Europe, where, in the absence of war or some other disturbing influence, the Lung Plague was mainly confined to the open Steppes in the East and the unfenced mountains in Central and Western Europe. In

these it continued without intermission, ready to be spread widely over the plains whenever the Steppe or mountain herds were rushed off into the commissariat parks of belligerent armies.

Let our sanitarians, our stockmen, our city magnates and our legislators learn from the experience in all past time, of Europe and Asia, of Africa and Australia, and no less of our own Eastern cities and suburbs, that there can be no success in dealing with this disease so long as the cattle of different owners are allowed to pasture in common in infected districts. Cattle Plague Commissions may be maintained, thousands of cattle may be killed, disinfection of buildings may be thorough, money may be poured out like water-but without a separate, fenced pasturage for each herd it will be necessary to kill every head of each infected dairy in order to stamp out the scourge. Around the city the movement of cattle may be stopped and the plague exterminated, but in the open Plains no such restriction is possible, and infection must become general and permanent.

INFECTION OF THE PLAINS WILL ENTAIL THAT OF THE PACIFIC COAST.

6th. The infection of our unfenced cattle ranges in the West means the universal infection of the United States. From those Plains cattle are sent for the supply of the mining cities in the Rocky Mountains and the Sierras, so that the infection would be carried onward until it should reach the shores of the Pacific. Texas and the Plains are also at the source of our Eastern cattle traffic, and if infected would speedily permeate all its devious channels, and scatter the plague over the whole of the Middle and Eastern States.

Should this time ever arrive, we shall be reduced to a worse condition than Europe, and shall suffer proportionally more. The great infected Steppes are at the source of the cattle traffic of Europe, as our Plains are at the source of ours. But the Tartar does not simply raise his cattle for beef as do our Western stock-raisers. In the Steppes the nomadic owner lives on the milk, cheese and meat of his herds, and drinks the Koumis made from the milk, but he is under no necessity of sending his surplus cattle to the markets of Western Europe. Again, the western frontier of Russia is patrolled day and night by a numerous guard of gendarmerie whose duty it is to compel all cattle to cross at the quarantine stations only, where they may be subjected to detention and examination. On our Plains, on the other hand, cattle are raised for beef only, and if they cannot be sent to the Eastern market the trade must be ruined.

In the second place, our Western graziers have virtually a monopoly of this business, and the vast proportions of the cattle traffic towards the East would render all attempts at detention and examination utterly useless. With the arrival of three thousand cattle at one point (Buffalo), daily, a detention of one week would lead to the aggregation of twenty thousand head, and upward, constantly. If the same were attempted for three months, the shortest time that would give any reasonable measure of protection, the accumulated cattle would amount up to 27,000. Add to this, that every herd of these must be kept sufficiently far apart from any other to obviate the danger of contagion through the air, as otherwise their quarantine could never be safely ended, and you have a series of obstacles that must show the utter impracticability of any such measure. No! infection of our grazing districts means the permanent infection of the entire United States, and as we are in danger of this from every day and every hour of delay in stamping out the scourge, it is well to note what would be the pecuniary result.

PROSPECTIVE LOSSES FROM GENERAL INFECTION.

Great Britian, with 6,000,000 head of cattle, has lost $10,000,000 per annum from this plague, though the great cattle raising district of the Highlands escaped. We,

with our 37,000,000 cannot therefore hope to lose less than $65,000,000 yearly. To-day the United States Government may obviate such a terrible consequence by the well directed expenditure of $2,000,000. Let her neglect it, and she must soon see her fair territory, naturally so salubrious, ravaged by a foreign plague, the losses from which will represent a debt of $1,300,000,000, with no prospect of abatement, but of a steady increase as the continent shall become more densely peopled.

To neglect such a matter is one of the gravest crimes; to let it await the leisure of legislators is the most foolhardy temerity; to let it become the football of political quibblers and theorists is the most consummate folly; to place its administration in the hands of political favorites or incompetent and half-hearted authorities is likely to prove an irredeemable blunder; and to deny to an Executive charged with the extermination of the plague sufficient means to make its work effectual, or sufficient power to overstep State boundaries in dealing with infected animals and in punishing offenders, is but to prolong the pestilence, to increase the final outlay, and to woo the infection of the Plains and the permanent establishment of the scourge.

CORNELL UNIVERSITY, ITHACA, N. Y.

JAMES LAW, F.R.C.V.S.