128 DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



hitherto unknown or undescribed in relation to any disease of man or animals. The facts 

 rendered show that it is developed in the hotter parts of the United States bordering on 

 the Gulf coast, where lands are rich, retentive, and undrained, and therefore constitute 

 the hotbeds of malarious or periodic diseases in the human family. So far as present 

 knowledge goes, it is capable of propagation in an intensified form among cattle which 

 feed on pastures traversed, in any part of the country beyond the original centers of 

 development, by southern herds. It is not improbable that comparative pathology may 

 here shed light on the precise nature of remittent and intermittent fevers in man; and 

 the fact that these have not been observed to extend by a form of contagion may be 

 explained by the conditions essential to the propagation of the bovine periodic fever. 

 Large masses of animals travel fresh from the breeding grounds of this indigenous 

 disease, and discharge large quantities of excrement on the food which is the carrier of 

 the morbid material into the systems of cattle that are contaminated and die. It is true 

 that anthrax, Siberian boil plague, or carbuncular fevers generally, from a peculiar decom 

 position in the liquids and tissues of the affected animals, are capable of being transferred 

 by its inoculation, under favorable circumstances, to healthy people, and indeed to all 

 warm-blooded creatures ; but there are indigenous maladies, somewhat allied to the splenic 

 fever of cattle, developed under like conditions, and capable of moderate extension from 

 the districts where they originate spontaneously. But the cattle in the South are affected 

 Avith a malady that is not inoculable, that is not propagated by the bites of insects and 

 by the transference of decomposed or poisoned blood and tissues into the structures of 

 healthy men or animals, and manifests in its method of propagation more of the features 

 of cholera than of other properly recorded malady. It does not belong to the group of 

 epizootics proper, or contagious diseases like pleuropneumonia, rinderpest, and the varied 

 forms of variola. It is not an infectious disease ; and the single observation reported by 

 the New York commissioners cannot outweigh the hundreds we have observed and care 

 fully traced, and which indicate that the cattle are not discharging, by their breath or 

 skin, into the air around them, any principles capable of perpetuating the malady. The 

 plagues proper spread regardless of soil, climate, food, geological formation, altitude, &c., 

 wherever sick animals approach or touch healthy ones. Splenic fever is not communicated 

 by a cow to its calf, and is absolutely stopped by a fence, unless some accident leads to 

 the mingling together of the southern animals with others they are capable of injuring. 

 The malady, engendered with peculiar virulence in western or eastern cattle, is not, unless 

 exceptionally and no properly attested exception has come to my knowledge commu 

 nicated by these to other animals that have not traversed the trails of Texan or other 

 southern herds. It is a modification, a poisoning of the food and possibly of the water 

 tainted by the manure of the southern cattle, whereby the malady is transmitted. It is 

 thus with human cholera. I do not wish to be understood that splenic fever is at all allied 

 to cholera beyond the peculiar and ordinary method of propagation from certain centers. 

 We know nothing of the spontaneous development of cholera and the centers whence it 

 springs. We can witness the independent and primary production of the Texas or Florida 

 fever by transporting western or eastern cattle to the South, where, fed on the pastures 

 apart from other animals, they contract the disease and die. 



Annually the Texan steers suffer, so far as my observations on cattle of all ages go, 

 from this same local influence, which, in their acclimatized systems, does not usually lead 



