A476 REPORT OF THE COMMISSIONER OF AGRICULTURE. 
by exposing the same for some time to a temperature of 212° F., or 
higher, either in an oven or in boiling hot water. 
As to a therapeutic treatment only a few words will be necessary. Some 
of the most heroic medicines have been used with very doubtful results. 
So, for instance, Professor Ercolani, in Turin, claims to have had good 
success with arsenate of strychnine, but others who have made the 
same experiments have had no success whatever. Lacaze (hevue Vétér., 
é&c., Toulouse, 1876), asserts to have been successful with large doses of 
alcohol, but he discriminates contagious and noncontagious glanders, 
and so no comment will be necessary. In former times cantharides were 
considered as a remedy, but later investigations have proved them to be 
perfectly worthless. That every kind of mercurial combination and a 
great many sure-cure nostrums have been used and been advertised as 
specific remedies, as in every other incurable disease, is too self-evident 
to need any further mentioning. 
The only rational treatment of a horse or other animal, affected with 
glanders, consists in a proper and effective application, in the right place, 
of either half an ounce of lead or five inches of steel; and until such 
treatment is invariably adopted, or made compulsory, there will be no 
prospect whatever of freeing this country from this loathsome disease, 
dangerous even to man, in whom, if once infected, it is just as incurable 
as in horses. 
THE AGRICULTURE AND SOILS OF CALIFORNIA. 
By E. W. HitGarp. 
Agriculture in California possesses many peculiarities, arising partly 
from climatic causes, and partly from the somewhat exceptional history 
of the industrial development of the State. From the condition of total 
neglect in which it was left during the prevalence of the mining fever, 
it has, in the course of a few years, risen to be the commanding indus- 
try of the State. But unlike the great agricultural States of the Mis- 
sissippi Valley, California has not undergone the slow and regular pro- 
cess of settlement by pioneer farmers, who, fleeing from the too close 
approach of towns and neighbors, as well as from soil exhaustion, keep 
selling out and moving west as part of their normal existence. The 
great tide-wave of the rush for gold cast a far different material on the 
shores of the Pacific; and when the placer mines ceased to yield for- 
tunes to the men of small means, and agriculture began to attract their 
attention as a surer mode of acquiring the coveted metal, very many 
of the hands that grasped the plow had never felt its touch before, 
while their owners would have been at aloss to distinguish a grain-field 
from a meadow; but among these, as well as among those who at that 
time returned to the plow after a few years’ digression, there was an 
unusual proportion of progressive, thinking, and reading men, whose 
ambition and energy had carried them forward when others fainted by 
the wayside. Both classes of men soon discovered that in a great 
many respects the rule-of-thumb experience and practice of the-older 
countries would not avail them here; and casting loose from precedent, 
they tried a “‘ new deal” in constructing for themselves a practice adapted 
to the new conditions. One of the controlling features being the scarcity 
and high price of labor, the introduction of labor-saving machinery 
was among the very first needs, instead of being a late fruit of long dis 
cussion and costly experience. Inasmuch as all such implements had to 
