DISEASES AND REMEDIES. 503 



rians, said he preferred homeopathic treatment, but the cures, like 

 the medicines, were infinitesimal. 



"Professor Gamgee, whom I met in London, said, 'our gov- 

 ernment ought at once to take the proper steps for crushing out 

 the disease, in the event of its reaching our shores. On its first 

 appearance in a herd, every animal should be immediately slaugh- 

 tered, premises purified, and every precaution taken that it spread 

 no further. We must not dilly-dally with the disease, but employ 

 prompt action and energetic measures. The men employed to do 

 this work should be stern and inflexible in their decisions, and 

 not be swayed by any sympathy for losses sustained by those 

 owning the herds. They should look upon it as a terrible 

 calamity, threatening the nation, which must be walled in and 

 crushed at all hazards, in its incipient stages. Take warning, 

 said he, by England's dilatory action, and you, in America, will 

 be spared one of the greatest calamities that ever befall any 

 country.'" 



We trust that the rinderpest in Western Europe, as well as 

 in its brief appearancu a few years since on our own side of the 

 Atlantic, has passed into history, not again to disturb our fears 

 with its anticipated ravages. 



ABORTION, OR SLINKING. 



This dangerous disorder has, of late, become rife in some of 

 our important dairy districts, to such an extent as to become 

 alarming; and no cause has yet been satisfactorily accounted for 

 it. It has been seldom, in past years, that cows have aborted 

 throughout the country generally. In our own cow keeping of 

 many years, chiefly in the best common way of farmers, with hun- 

 dreds of them, we have never had, to exceed, in all, half a dozen 

 cases. 



Abortion has, however, within a few years past, become alarm- 

 ingly prevalent in a portion of the dairy districts of the State of 



