176 DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



disease, wrote of the probabilities of its dissemination from farm to farm like the virus of 

 rinderpest a result of which no fears could reasonably have been entertained, native stock, 

 having the disease, not communicating it to others * Yet this alarm, notwithstanding the 

 extravagance of its manifestation, accomplished good results, calling public attention to 

 abuses in cattle transportation, exciting inquiry which resulted in more intelligent views 

 of the subject, and promoting legislative action protective of the stock-growing interests. 



The first notice of this disease which I have been able to find is contained in a lecture 

 delivered before the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture, by Dr. James Mease, 

 November 3, 1814, upon the diseases of domestic animals, in which it is stated that 

 cattle of a certain district in South Carolina &quot; so certainly disease all other?) with which 

 they mix in their progress to the North that they are prohibited by the people of Virginia 

 from passing through the State.&quot; It was mentioned as a singular fact that the South 

 Carolina cattle had the power of infecting others with which they associated, while they 

 themselves were in perfect health; and also that cattle from Europe or the interior, brought 

 to the vicinity of the sea, were attacked with a disease that generally proved fatal. Dr. 

 Mease corroborates these views from personal observation in Pennsylvania in 1796. 

 September 20, 1825, he read before the same society an &quot; account of a contagious disease 

 propagated by a drove of southern cattle in perfect health.&quot; The following extract is 

 given : 



&quot; Tn the month of August of the year 1796, I was on a tour for the recovery of my 

 health, and having called at Anderson s ferry, [now Marietta, above Columbia, in Lancaster 

 County,] on the Susquehanna, I found the people of the house in great distress on account 

 of the death of some of the cattle and sickness of others, which had occurred in a few days 

 after a drove from the south had left the place. Upon inquiry, I was informed that the 

 drover merely requested and obtained permission to confine his cattle for one night in a 

 plowed field, and I was assured that the stock of Mr. Anderson had no intercourse with 

 the drove, which, after staying all night, pursued their journey in the morning to Lancaster. 

 There several head were disposed of to different persons, and in every instance, as I was 

 informed, they communicated disease to the stock with which they mixed. The admission 

 of a single head was enough to give rise to it. As the drove of cattle exhibited no mark 

 of illness, the mystery of the cause was inexplicable, and is so to this day. They stopped 

 a day or two near Downingtown, thirty-two miles from Philadelphia, on the western 

 turnpike, and soon after, the field they occupied received another drove which had been 

 purchased by the late Mr. Strieker, of Columbia, on the Susquehanna. It consisted of 

 two hundred and sixty head, and, as I was afterward informed by Mr. S., had been pur 

 chased by him in Maryland in the vicinity of Hagerstown, and between that and the 

 Cove Mountain. Sixty of this drove were sold by Mr. 8. near the Billet, in Montgomery 

 County, the greater part of which died. Several others were sold at the Middle Ferry on 

 the Schuylkill, eight of them were bought by the late Isaac Coates, above Dowingtown, 

 and all died. Some taken to Germantown shared the same fate. Part of the South 

 Carolina drove was sold at Blue Bell Tavern, a well-known sale place for drove cattle, and 



* No fact in connection with the Texas cattle disease is more firmly established than this. Among all the records of its 

 ravages, in all the years of its history, no instance of a secondary generation of the virus, no statement of its communication 

 from a siclc northern animnl to a well one. is noted, with a single exception, (referred to hereafter.) which, if really an exception 

 at all, only serves to establish the rule. 



