490 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



Hogs drinking from these springs have never had the disease, vrhile all 

 farmers living along the streams in both directions have again and again 

 lost most of their hogs. Animals dying of the disease should at once be 

 burned on the spot where they die. Thousands of them have been buried 

 after being dragged bleeding over the ground for considerable distances. 

 From the buried carcasses the germs get into the streams and go wherever 

 they go. This is the general way for the dissemination of disease germs. 

 There are, of course, accidental cases. A railroad caiTying diseased hogs 

 scatters the disease; a dog may carry the germs on his feet, or the farmer 

 himself may. But these accidental cases do little harm compared with 

 the wholesale spreading of the disease by contaminated brooks and 

 streams. Figv VI. 



CREMATION. 



If we had been wise we would, after Pasteur's experiments on anthrax, 

 have decreed the cremation of the dead, though embalming is nearly as 

 safe as cremation. But many undertakers can not properly embalm a 

 body, and, besides, it is everywhere the custom to consult the friends of 

 the dead as to their wishes in the matter; that is, we permit people, who do 

 not know what they do, to keep alive germs of disease that may cause 

 the sickness and death of generations not yet born. Forty years after 

 a pestilence of scarlet fever in an English town the minister plowed the 

 cemetery for a garden, and the scourge which every one but the lone- 

 some mothers had forgotten, fell upon the same town with more than its 

 first destructiveness. Poetry for some thousands of years has given to 

 the grave its drapery of words— the most sacred, consoling and tender that 

 art can suggest: The "moldering earth," "the clods of the valley," "the 

 narrow house." To "go back again to Mother Earth" appears to be the 

 natural thing, and "unto dust thou shalt return" seems a divine decree. 

 Cremation is, nevertheless, rapidly gaining. It leaves us at once with a 

 memory and a spirit, and this is best, and one day it will seem to be best. 

 Expression can and will do for the final "purification by fire" all it has 

 for the grave. But all this is sentiment. The struggle with disease is 

 real; cremation will help us; this should be enough. 



HYDROPHOBIA. 



Pasteur now undei-took the conquest of hydrophobia. Its cause was 

 unknown. It was certain death, attended by the most awful circum- 

 stances conceivable. Genius seeks such a task. Pasteur thought that 

 the notion that hydrophobia was a disease of the salivary glands was a 

 mistake, for the reason that madness is always a symptom, and this, he 

 said, must involve the brain. His first step was to transfer a portion of 

 the brain of a mad dog to the brain of one that was not mad. This soon 

 produced madness, and his first point was gained. He now inoculated a 



