508 AMERICAN CATTLE. 



Some have imagined it to be contagious. It is destructively 

 propagated among the cows, but this is probably to be explained 

 on a different principle than that of contagion. It has been 

 stated that the cow is an animal considerably imaginative and 

 highly irritable during the period of pregnancy. In abortion, 

 the foetus is often putrid before it is discharged ; and the pla- 

 centa, or afterbirth, rarely or never immediately follows it, but 

 becomes decomposed, and, as it drops away in fragments, emits 

 a peculiar and most noisome smell. This smell seems to be sin- 

 gularly annoying to the other cows they sniff at it, and then 

 run bellowing about. Some sympathetic influence is produced 

 on their uterine organs, and in a few days a greater or less num- 

 ber of those that had pastured together likewise abort. Hence 

 arises the rapidity with which the fetus is usually taken away 

 and buried deeply, and far from the cows; and hence the more 

 effectual preventive of smearing the parts of the cow with tar 

 or stinking oils, in order to conceal or subdue the smell; and 

 hence, too, the ineffectual preventing of removing her to a far 

 distant pasture. 



"Chabert, in his 'Veterinary Instructions,' relates a singular 

 case of this a kind of pest or plague in the dairy of a farmer 

 at Toury. For^,hirty years his cows had been subject to abor- 

 tion. His cowhouse was large and airy; his cows were appar- 

 ently in good health; they were fed like others in the village; 

 they drank from the same pond; there was nothing different in 

 the pasture ; his servants were not accustomed to ill-use the cat- 

 tle, and he had changed these servants many times in the thirty 

 years. He had changed his bull many a time ; he had pulled 

 down his cowhouse, and he had built another in a different situa- 

 tion, with a different aspect, and on a different plan; he had even 

 (agreeably to the superstition of the neighborhood,) taken away 

 the aborted calf through the window, that the curse of future 

 abortion might not be entailed on the cow that passed over the 



