THE LUNG PLAGUE OF CATTLE. 23 



terial was but added fuel to the flame. On a confined and well-fenced 

 farm, where the stock belonged to a single owner, the expediency of 

 avoiding new purchases until the disease had literally burnt itself out 

 was usually appreciated, and thus a limit was set to its ravages; but 

 on the open commons of the cities and villages everything conspired to 

 keep up the infection. With many the loss of a few cows was but 

 viewed as a run of ill ///,-, and the more intelligent soon came to realize 

 that those animals which recovered had a special value, being safe from 

 all future attack. The high prices of milk made cow-keeping remunera- 

 tive in spite of the losses, and thus the numerous deaths but served to 

 increase the purchases of fresh and susceptible animals, and these in 

 their turn falling victims to the disease served to maintain the affection 

 in an unending series of cases. To those unacquainted with the cash 

 returns from city cows it may seem absurd to offset the losses by the 

 prices obtained for milk. Yet, a good cow yielding 15 quarts of milk 

 daily, at 10 cents a quart, draws $1.50 per day. In summer, when the 

 cows get most of their food on the common-pasturage, nearly all of this 

 is clear profit, so that that cow will have paid her full price of $<]:> in 

 six weeks. Two months of good milking may yield $90 worth of milk, 

 or a half more than the original value of the cow. One New York dairy- 

 man (Joseph Hyde, Seventieth street) lost 20 cows in four months of 

 1879, more than the full number of stock he kept at any one time, and 

 though entirely dependent on stall-feeding, he confessed that he had 

 made money in this year. With such a result upon purchased feed, it 

 is small marvel that the milkman who had a free pasturage could afford 

 to face the mortality and steadily fill up the ranks with fresh subjects. 



As illustrating the baleful influence of these common-pasturages, it 

 may be noted that around such towns and villages the lung plague has 

 always been more extensively prevalent at the end of autumn, after the 

 commingling of herds for a season, than in spring, after a winter of com- 

 parative seclusion in the stables. This serves to place in the strongest 

 light the one known cause of the disease contagion and to emphasize 

 the necessity for the most stringent rules for controlling the movement 

 of cattle in infected districts. 



But the dangers of the cow trade in our large eastern cities do not 

 end here. In each of the larger cities are one or two dozen persons en- 

 gaged more or less extensively in the cow trade, and if possible each of 

 them keeps a private stable for the accommodation of cows held for sale. 

 But these stables receive not only the fresh and healthy cows direct from 

 the country, but also the sick and unsuitable ones which have been sent 

 out to dairymen on trial and returned to the dealer as coming short of 

 the yield of milk guaranteed. It follows that cows that sicken in the 

 dairies in great part find their way back to the dealers' stable, so that 

 that becomes early infected and afterward remains as a permanent center 

 of infection. The other fresh cattle corning into this stable are almost 

 without exception susceptible to the plague, so that the chances are in 

 favor of the majority leaving this stable in an infected condition. Thus 

 the trade works incessantly in a vicious circle ; the fresh cow, if it esc ipes 

 infection, on first reaching the city probably enters an infected stable, 

 and when the plague begins to tell on its health it is returned to the 

 dealers' stable to infect the cattle standing there; als3 the stable, if that 

 has not been done previously, and a new town-herd into which it is sent 

 later on trial, only to be returned again and again until it perishes or 

 makes a tardy recovery. 



Another practice of these city dealers is to send out cows on trial to 

 different milkmen, and if they prove unsatisfactory to move them on to 



