Commissioner of Agriculture. 247 



tarch reports that Rome was visited about 740 B. C. with a 

 severe epizootic of anthrax. Dionysius of Halicarnassus (488 

 B. C.) and Livy (425 B. G.) relate examples of epizootics in which 

 tihe disease attacked at first cattle on pasture, then those in 

 sheds, sacrificial animals, priests, herdsmen, country people and 

 finally the entire population. In Lucretius (428 B. C.) we find 

 for the first time the name of ' ignis sacer ' applied to anthrax 

 and in Columella the name of pustula. Virgil described an 

 infectious ovine disease which was transmitted to man in con- 

 sequence of wearing the hides or wool of stricken animals and 

 which produced deep postules on the skin. Pliny mentions a 

 disease of boils in the province of Narbonne in Gaul at the time 

 of the migration of nations. The Arab physicians described 

 anthrax as ' Persian fire.' Mezeray (966 A. D.) was the first to 

 use the name ' Ignis St. Antonii.' Johannes Wierus describes 

 in the second half of the sixteenth century several epizootics in 

 Italy (1552, 1598 and 1599) during which periods the Senate in 

 Venice forbade the sale of beef on pain of death. Athanasius 

 Kirchner described in 1617 a bovine disease which infected man- 

 kind so that 60,000 people died of it. Anthrax of the tongue 

 spread to an extraordinary extent during 1662 in the neighbor- 

 hood of Lyons and throughout France during 1710 and 1731. 

 Ramazzini states that anthrax of the throat raged in 1690 in 

 Padua among oxen and pigs. Anthrax appeared during 1712 

 in Germany (at first in the neighborhood of Augsbury) and in 

 Hungary during 1726, in Poland, Silesia and Saxony; during 

 1731 and 1757, in France as gloss anthrax, or carbuncle of the 

 tongue; among almost all the domestic animals, horses, don- 

 keys, cattle, sheep, pigs, deer, dogs, fowl, fish and men. 



" In 1755 and 1761 it appeared in Franconia; in 175S and 1759 

 in Finland and Russia; in 1774 in Guadeloupe (West Indies). 

 Chabert demonstrated in 17S0 that the different kinds of 

 anthrax were really one and the same disease. He classified 

 and named them in a manner which has been followed up to this 

 day. Kausch published in 1805 a good description of anthrax 

 but denied its contagiousness. Since then we may mention in 



