354 AGRICULTURAL REPORT. 
etrated. It prevails very frequently on cattle dealers’ farms in the same 
country. 
aach comprehensive facts as these narrow the list of real causes down 
to the simple contact of the virus with a healthy animal. This virus, how- 
ever, is perhaps the most contagious known. It is often carried on the 
clothes, boots, and hands of men; on the fibers of hay or straw; pre- 
served on the walls, floors, mangers, and other fittings of buildings; on 
stable utensils ; in yards, parks, roads, and railroad cars; on drinking 
troughs ; or it may be carried on the legs or bodies of dogs, chickens, 
rats, and other animals which themselves escape the infliction. In short, 
any solid body may retain, and be a bearer of, this contagion. Fortu- 
nately, it does not spread to any extent in the atmosphere. Nothing is 
more common than to find a herd on one side of a road struek down 
by the disease, while another in a field on the opposite side of the road 
remains perfectly healthy. It may be carried by a strong wind in the 
form of the virulent saliva, or the virus may dry up on light bodies, 
such as paper, hay, &c., which are afterward borne off by the wind. It 
may be carried by men or animals, or by water running from the diseased 
to the healthy lot; but, in the absence of such agencies, the breadth 
of a common road is amply sufficient to circumscribe the disease. 
RELATIVE SUSCEPTIBILITY OF DIFFERENT ANIMALS. 
Cioven-footed animals appear to be the natural victims of this disease, 
and all species are about equally obnoxious to its attacks ; but it may be 
communicated to many if not all other warm-blooded animals by inocula- 
tion or by contact of the virnlent discharges with their mucous mem- 
branes. 
Its transmission to man has been noticed during almost every great 
outbreak since that of 1695. It has been reported, among others, by 
Valentine, Nadberny, Levitzky, Kolb, Hertwig, Rayer, Bosquet, Londe, 
Levigny, Dundussy, Hiibner, Holmes, Balfour, Karkeek, and Watson. 
Cases of the disease in man have been seen in Albany and at South Do- 
ver, Dutchess County, New York, during the present outbreak. It shows 
itself in man by slight feverishness, and the formation on the tongue 
and inside the lips and cheeks, and sometimes on the hands, of small 
blisters, rarely amounting to the bulkof alentil. In children and young 
animals, feeding exclusively on milk, diarrhea and fatal inflammation of 
the stomach and bowels occasionally supervene. It is further to be 
dreaded that the malady, gaining a lasting hold on the dairies of our 
large cities, may swell the lists of mortality of the infant population by 
inducing those fatal diarrhcwas and enteritis reported by Hiibner, Bal- 
four, and Watson. . f 
Its existence in horses is reported by Sagar, Cleaver, and Laubender, 
but the susceptibility of the soliped is very slight, and he can prebably 
be affected only by inoculation. 
In chickens it has been frequently noticed—among others, by Hennicke, 
Sagar, Lamberlicchi, Dickens, and Youatt. Chickens were attacked in 
December, 1870, on the farm of Mr. Highmie, La Grange, Dutchess 
County, New York. Drinking the castaway milk is probably the com- 
mon cause. Dogs and cats have been noticed by Lagar, Younghusband, 
and others, to suffer from drinking the milk. A shepherd’s dog at Mr. 
Eighmie’s suffered from the disease, and another, Mr. Preston’s, South 
Jover, New York, had only partially recovered when seen by the writer. 
SYMPTOMS. 
The victims may usually be picked out from a herd, twelve to twenty- 
