12 DEPARTMENT OP AGRICULTURE. 



lias spread rather widely. This autumn the cattle of thirty different places in Schleswig 

 have been kept in a kind of quarantine/ 



In 1858 an agricultural society in Oldenburg purchased some Ayrshires to distribute 

 among its members for breeding purposes. Wherever these animals went they communi 

 cated disease. Oldenburg has kept very free from pleuropneumonia from the activity with 

 which the infected animals are destroyed at the outbreak of disease. The same remark 

 applies to Meckleuburg-Schwerin and Schleswig-Holstein. With regard to the latter prov 

 ince, it transpires that in 1859 some Ayrshire cattle imported in the vicinity of Tondern 

 communicated pleuropneumonia. 



In the month of August, 1860, an agent of the Norwegian government purchased a 

 number of Ayrshire cattle ; they were taken to the Royal Agricultural College at Aas, and 

 in the commencement of November pleuropneumonia broke out among them. Dr. Oluf 

 Thesen has informed me that he limited the disease to the college by destroying the native 

 cattle with which the Ayrshire stock had come in contact, and keeping the Ayrshire ani 

 mals to themselves. Norway had been exempt from this cattle plague, and owing to Pro 

 fessor Thesen s activity it now enjoys the same immunity. 



In the month of September, 1858, Mr. Boodle, farmer, near Melbourne, imported a 

 cow from England; she landed in good condition and gave milk. She died of pleuro- 

 pnenmoni:i six weeks after her arrival. Two other head of cattle belonging to Mr. Boodle 

 died ;u December, and another in January. The disease continued to spread, and the 

 losses have been enormous and almost incessant in Victoria and even in New South Wales. 



HISTORY OF THE LUNG PLAGUE IN AMERICA. 



The first notice of the lung plague in the United States dates back to 1843, when a 

 German cow, imported direct from Europe, and taken from shipboard into a Brooklyn 

 cattle shed, communicated the disease, which, it is said and believed, has prevailed more or 

 less in Kings County, Long Island, ever since. 



In 1847 Mr. Thomas Richardson, of New Jersey, imported some English stock. Signs 

 of disease were noticed Boon, and the whole of Mr. Richardson s stock, valued at $10,000, 

 were slaughtered by him to prevent an extension of the plague. 



In 1850 a fresh supply of the lung-plague poison reached Brooklyn from England in 

 the system of an imported cow. 



Mr. W. W. Chenery, of Belmont, Massachusetts, has related the history of the intro 

 duction of lung plague from Holland into Massachusetts in 1859. Four cows were pur 

 chased for him at Purmerend and Beemster, shipped at Rotterdam early in April on board 

 the bark J. C. Humphreys, which arrived in America on the 23d of May, 1859. Two of 

 the cows were driven to Belmont; the other two had to be transported on wagons, owing 

 to their &quot;extremely bad condition,&quot; one of them &quot;not having been on her feet during the 

 twenty days preceding her arrival.&quot; On the 31st of May, it being deemed impossible 

 that this cow could recover, she was slaughtered, and on the 2d of June following the 

 second cow died. The third cow sickened on the 20th of June, and died in ten days. The 

 fourth continued in a thriving condition. A Dutch cow, imported in 1852, was the next 

 one observed ill, early in the month of August following, and she succumbed on the 20th. 

 Several other animals were taken sick in rapid succession, and then it was that the idea 

 was first advanced that the disease was identical with that known in Europe as epizootic 



