10 DEPAETMENT OF AGEICULTUEE. 



inoculation of the disease, which never resulted in practical good. Outbreaks continued 

 to be recorded in Hanover at short intervals from 1820 to 1843, and the country has 

 never been altogether free since. 



The malady appeared in Saxony in 1827, and has often raged there since, as shown 

 in the writings of Haubner, and the observations made by Leisering and others. 



In 1862 1 made a careful study of the progress of pleuropneumonia toward the British 

 Isles through Holland, and it is from these two countries that the New World, Africa, 



O 



and the Australian colonies have been contaminated within the past quarter of a century. 



The disease entered Holland, according to Numann, the director of the veterinary 

 school at Utrecht, in 1833, by the importation of cattle affected with the disease from 

 Prussia, and purchased by a distiller, Vandenbosch, in Gelderland. In 1835 it was 

 transmitted from Gelderland to Utrecht, thence into South Holland, and it raged especially 

 near the great markets of Rotterdam and Schiedam. The Island of Zeeland then began 

 to suffer wherever cattle were injudiciously imported from South Holland, and some 

 outbreaks were attributed to infected cattle from South Holland, North Brabant, and 

 West Flanders From importations of infected cattle, the lung disease attacked the 

 stock on a few farms scattered through the provinces of Drenthe, Groningen, and Overyssel. 

 It was as late as 1842 that Friesland was attacked. British ports were thrown open to 

 the cattle trade by Sir Robert Peel, and the demands of our markets caused a rush of 

 stock through and from the northern provinces of Holland, which infected them in this 

 year. The first traces of pleuropneumonia were observed at Nejiga and Wurms. The 

 Dutch government ordered the slaughter of all the infected cattle, and Friesland again 

 remained free of the disease until 1845. Then the British trade again increased ; cattle 

 were passing from Overyssel to Harlingen, and in the month of December, 1845, the 

 malady appeared at St. Nicolunsga, the following March at Mirus, and soon after at Enk- 

 huyscn. Prevention, by slaughtering diseased cattle, was enforced ; the authorities in 

 Overyssel were asked to adopt similar measures, that there should be no renewed intro 

 duction of disease from that province. The cattle trade was too active, and no sooner 

 was the malady extinguished in one spot than it appeared at others. In the last half of 

 the year 1847 the disease broke out in sixteen stables in sixteen different districts. A 

 last attempt was made to arrest the malady, and seven hundred and three sick or suspected 

 animals were killed and buried. Larger and larger did the number of infected stables 

 become as the cattle dealers movements increased. In 1848 fifty-eight different outbreaks 

 occurred. By 1863 five to six thousand out of the fourteen thousand stables in which cattle 

 are kept in Friesland had been visited by the disease, and the annual mortality rose from 

 5.25 per thousand in 1850 to nearly 40 per thousand. 



It was probably somewhere between 1839 and 1841 that some Dutch cattle were 

 imported into the county of Cork, Ireland, by gentlemen related to a British consul at the 

 Hague This was before the days of free trade in stock, and the animals were introduced 

 under some special permit. Customs of this early period have their representatives in 

 County Cork at the present day, and my inquiries lead me to believe that the earliest 

 of these importations were followed by the manifestations of pleuropneumonia. It spread 

 from Cork into Limerick in 1844, and thence to Carlow, Kilkenny, Tipperary, Waterford, 

 Wicklow, Meath, Galway, and Roscommon. The losses in Ireland have been enormous, 

 and indeed much larger than in England and Scotland. The north of Ireland has been 



