State Agricultural Society. 567 



Second — Tobacco, twenty pounds; potash, six pounds; lime, six 

 pounds; tar, two quarts; to one hundred gallons of water. Make the 

 potash and lime into a thin paste; add the tar, and mix till they combine; 

 then stir into the tobacco decoction, which should have been heated to 

 the boiling point. 



Tbird — Make a strong pickle of salt and water, and to every two 

 buckets add one bucket of strong whitewash (of lime); this should be 

 put only on sheep recently shorn. 



Fourth — Pulverize finely one pound of corrosive sublimate, and add 

 it slowly (no faster than it will dissolve) to one hundred gallons of 

 water. This is a very effectual wash, but unless the proportions are 

 strictly adhered to, had better not be used. This is the cleanest and 

 pleasantest dip used, and in the above proportions sufficiently innocent. 



IS LEGISLATION IN ORDER? 



Taken in time and followed up with due persistence, scab can always 

 be controlled completely, but until a radical reform is wrought in this 

 feature of California sheep husbandry, no one can be permanently safe 

 against it. Any fallen log or piece of fence against which a scabby 

 sheep may have rubbed itself, suffices to start the disease again in a flock 

 a full twelvemonth after it has apparently been effectually eradicated. 

 Shearers may bring it on their clothes from a neighbor's pen. If a 

 public road run through the farm, a flock is not safe in changing from 

 fields on one side of this road to others on the opposite side — scabby 

 sheep may have been driven along it and left the contagion behind them. 

 In Australia, I learn, it is made a misdemeanor, punished by sharp pen- 

 alties, to drive scabby sheep on a public highway, or to have them in 

 possession without taking prompt measures to cure them; and that fun- 

 damental principle of justice and our common law — that "a man shall 

 so use his own property as not to injure his neighbors "■ — authorizes and 

 demands the enforcement of this regulation; at least, as to driving along 

 the public highway. It will be observed that the driving of scabby 

 sheep over the face of the country is a liberal distributing of sure poison, 

 against the injui'ies of which no care or precaution can guard. It will, 

 I think, be conceded, that we have at least as much right to protection 

 against this injury as against the firing of paper gun wads amongst our 

 dry grain, or any other gratuitous and mischievous nuisance. None 

 will object to such a regulation except the owners of scabby flocks, 

 which, as I have shown, are frequently flocks that their owners have 

 merely neglected. If our great flocks of Merinos are to continue devel- 

 oping, nothing can contribute to that end more than tho wise regulation 

 above cited. But its enforcement is not to be asked on the ground of 

 fostering or promoting sheep husbandry. It is sufficient and j>roper to 

 ask it on the single ground of justice, because it is right, and goes to put 



down a wrong. 



OTHER DISEASES. 



Scab is the only infectious disease, within my experience, that the 

 California shepherd has to contend with to any extent. I have heard of 

 the rot, and several others; but as to the rot, I have yet to see the first 

 flock afflicted with that disease — as it is described by the older writers 

 of the Atlantic States and Europe. I have seen 



