1866. | The Cattle Plague. 25 
especially the Edinburgh and London cowkeepers. These foreign 
cattle have introduced a new and specific poison into this country, 
which has spread with unexampled rapidity and virulence, destroy- 
ing upwards of ninety per cent. of the animals in which it has 
become developed. This is the prevalent theory on the subject. 
There are, indeed, many who believe that our cattle plague is no 
new disease, but only the aggravation of an old-standing malady 
produced by the weakened condition of our live stock, owing to the 
hard summer and winter of 1864, and their subsequent indulgence 
in the luxuriant “keep” of the spring and summer of 1865—under 
the circumstances of the miserable crowding and confinement of 
town cowhouses. But they fail to account for the altogether 
unique virulence and destructiveness of the attack, and they assume 
without foundation that there were the same difficulty and difference 
in feeding the town-kept stock as were experienced in the country 
during the dry year 1864, which preceded this attack. 
The London cowhouses are no doubt, many of them, disgrace- 
fully close; and the cattle are kept in an unnaturally excited state 
by food and warmth; but their condition has been improving of late 
years, and whereas formerly no supervision whatever was exercised, 
now that every cowkeeper must annually renew his licence, the 
justices are every year insisting on more stringent provisions for 
their regulation. In St. Pancras, when licences were first required, 
600 cubic feet of space were insisted on for every cow. Since then 
the measure has been raised to 800, and latterly to 1,000 cubic 
feet per cow. In a cowhouse 16 feet square by 7 feet high—a 
cellar (open to the yard) beneath a dwelling-house—which we 
visited the other day, they used to keep ten cows! When first a 
licence was required the number was reduced to two, and now the 
Licence is, very properly, altogether refused in this and every other 
case of cowhouses in or under dwelling-houses. We mention this 
in illustration of the improvement which had been witnessed in the 
condition of the London cows before the advent of this attack, 
which cannot, therefore, be attributed to the aggravation at this 
time of any long existing mischief in their management. 
The Cattle Plague is, indeed, no new thing—not even in 
England—for the records of last century prove that a distemper 
equally sudden in its advent, and equally destructive during its 
continuance, attacked our herds in 1745-1757. To quote from the 
recently published report of the Royal Commission on this subject: 
“There is every reason to believe that the distemper which in 1715 
made a brief inroad, but was promptly expelled, and which in 1745 
renewed the attack and held its ground till 1757, was exactly the 
same as the present plague. Of this we have proof in the 
descriptions extant of the symptoms then observed, and of the 
morbid appearances after death. In a paper communicated to the 
