22 THE LUNG PLAGUE OF CATTLE. 



a smaller scale, those inimical conditions which served to perpetuate 

 the plague in South Africa and Australia. Fortunately for America, 

 this is but on a small scale, and as we recede from the city limits we 

 come on all sides upon inclosed farms, which form a natural barrier to 

 animal infection, and serve to make it controllable by sanitary means. 



At a very early date the infection had seized on the city dairy-herds 

 of New York, Brooklyn, Jersey City, Newark, Elizabeth, New Bruns- 

 wick, Trenton, and even Gerinantown, Philadelphia^ and Baltimore, in 

 each of which it found the same favoring conditions, and therefore in 

 each it made a permanent home. Several extensions into Connecticut 

 have been recognized and stamped out by the ever- watchful cattle com- 

 missioners. 



WHY THE LUNG PLAGUE HAS EXTENDED SOUTH ONLY. 



The fact that lung plague has confined its ravages to the seaboard 

 between Long Island and Virginia, while it has made no serious exten- 

 sion to the North nor West, demands some explanation. This explana- 

 tion is easy and satisfactory, and attention to it is of no small conse- 

 quence in connection with the proposed extinction of the contagion. 



From New York southward to Virginia is a stretch of flat fertile land 

 hemmed in by the Alleghany Mountains on the one side and the ocean 

 on the other. This plain is not only well cultivated and well stocked 

 with domestic animals, but it is the seat of very varied and extensive 

 manufacturing interests. The demands of these latter have led to the 

 formation of a number of growing cities and villages, around which is 

 much land held by speculators and laid out for building, but still un- 

 used, and which remains uninclosed, being practically a common pas- 

 ture land for the cows of the city or village. On these commons, or 

 unfenced pastures, meet daily in summer the cows of the poor, the herds 

 of the small milkman, and the cattle of dealers and drovers j and thus 

 during the entire summer any infection that may be present has free 

 scope to extend from cow to cow and irom herd to herd. As all these 

 places from New York to Baltimore were within easy reach of New York 

 by rail, dealers naturally supplied them by cattle from the New York 

 and Jersey City markets whenever the prices promised a profit on the 

 transaction. There was the further temptation to the New York dealer 

 to send infected herds to such places, since there would be less risk of 

 exposure of the nefarious nature of the transaction ; and, the sale once 

 affected, there would be less danger of after complaints or actions for 

 damages. In this way the plague was steadily spread for 250 miles 

 south of New York, concentrating itself around such cities as Newark, 

 Elizabeth, New Brunswick, Trenton, Easton, Beading, Burlington, Cam- 

 den, Gerinantown, Philadelphia, Wilmington, Dover, Baltimore, An- 

 napolis, Georgetown, Washington, and Alexandria. Almost every step 

 in advance was a permanent gain, for each city presented on a small 

 scale, in its common-pasturages and its frequent changes of cattle, ren- 

 dered necessary to keep up a uniform supply of milk and fill up the 

 ranks of the dying cattle, the counterpart of the unfenced cattle-ranges 

 of the Old World and of the southern hemisphere, where the plague has 

 gained a permanent establishment. Thus each newly-infected city be- 

 came in its turn a fresh and permanent center of infection, from which 

 the disease spread outward over new fields 011 every favorable opportu- 

 nity. In such places it was next tq, impossible for the plague to die out 

 of its own accord, for there was a constant and increasing influx of fresh 

 and susceptible subjects to supply the growing losses, and this new ina- 



