384 Chronicles of Sctence. [July, 
during convalescence, the recoveries were 57 per cent.; with 
mixed food of mashes and hay, they were 22 per cent.; while, 
among cattle fed entirely with dry food, and treated medicinally 
with drugs, the recoveries were but 13 per cent.” These results 
were gathered out of the history of 503 cases, of which 191, 
or nearly 38 per cent. on the whole, recovered. We add that the 
returns published on June 1st intimate that 244,455 cases, in all, 
had occurred up till that date, of which 1,207 were reported 
during the previous week ; the weekly numbers having been sink- 
ing very rapidly indeed since the month of March, when the 
number of attacks amounted in one week to as many as 18,000. 
The number of animals hitherto reported as having died or 
been slaughtered does not much exceed 200,000 of all ages, or 
barely 5 per cent. of the number which recently published statistics 
declare to be the present cattle population of Great Britain; but 
the losses have no doubt been greater on the whole than the 
Government returns declare ; and there is this especial aggravation 
of their severity, that they have not been evenly spread over the 
country, but have fallen with destructive effect on particular coun- 
ties. In Cheshire, for example, which is almost exclusively a dairy 
county, no fewer than 4,800 places have been visited by the 
plague. In these places there were 90,434 cattle, of which 
60,574 have been attacked, and upwards of 50,000 of them are 
dead. The quiet arithmetical view of the subject as a national 
loss, which a mere statist may be disposed to take, thus altogether 
ignores the almost absolute ruin which has befallen individual 
localities and even counties. Our immunity for the future depends 
a good deal upon the efficiency of the dismfectants which have been 
employed in those localities where the disease has occurred, and 
where, if the poison which is left by it has not, been thoroughly 
destroyed, it will be almost certain to occur again. It appears to 
us that some risk arises here out of the insufficient distinction made 
in the popular estimate of them between true disinfectants and 
mere deodorizing antiseptics. The latter do, in effect, merely lock 
up the poison which they deal with ; and the harmless condition to 
which, for the time, it is reduced by their agency, may be only a 
temporary result of their employment. Lapse of time may set it 
free again; and, plainly, it is only those agencies which decompose 
and break up the organic matters implicated, redistributing their 
elements in new forms of combination, that are unquestionably and 
ultimately trustworthy. For these reasons, we should greatly pre- 
fer, after a thorough washing of the infected premises with some 
alkaline ley, the use of sulphurous acid or chlorine gas—the one 
obtained by burning sulphur and the other by adding hydro- 
chloric acid to the peroxide of manganese—in the cow-house 
where the plague has been, to the use of carbolic and other tar 
