38 BOARD OF AGRICULTUEE. 



Dr. Salmon. I have this question sent up to me : " Can^ 

 abortion be propagated ? Will the discharge from an aborted 

 cow give the disease to another cow coming in contact with 

 it ? " That is another way of asking if it is a contagious dis- 

 ease, I suppose. There is no doubt that there are two forms 

 of abortion, one of which may be the result of mechanical 

 injuries' to the animal, or which may result from improper 

 food of some kind, or from the position in which the animal 

 stands in the stable, or from slipping, or some such cause as 

 that. I have never considered that this form of the disease- 

 could be contagious. It has seemed to me there was another 

 form of the disease which was always produced by contagion 

 or infection. In the case to which I have referred, which oc- 

 curred at the South, the man who owned the herd said to 

 me that he did not know of any way in which that disease 

 could have started, except that the animal had slipped in 

 crossing a jDair of bars. I then said, " I don't believe it will 

 spread." But in a few weeks there was another case ; in a 

 month more there was another ; a week or two later there 

 was a fourth. We began to see that we had an infectious 

 disease. We were well satisfied of it, from the number of 

 cases which had occurred. Then I said to the owner r 

 "Perhaps this disease may start from mechanical injuries, 

 and if so of course it may start from injurious food, 

 from ergot in the hay, or some such cause." We went on 

 and treated the case with sulphuric acid as a disinfectant, with 

 the result I have stated, and succeeded in getting rid of the 

 disease entirely. The man who owned the herd is a close 

 observer, and a man who watches his cows carefully, — the 

 last man whom you would think likely to overlook an im- 

 portant fact, — but he told me afterwards that in looking 

 over his books, he had found that he bought a cow from 

 a stable where this disease had occurred before, and that this 

 cow had stood by the side of the cow that aborted. So that 

 we had just as much evidence as we needed that the disease 

 had been imported in this case ; and I suspect that a similar 

 explanation would apply to many other cases where it is 

 supposed the trouble comes, in the first instance, from me- 

 chanical injury. There are very few men who have sufficient 

 patience to watch these things closely enough to be able ta 



