28 THE LUNG PLAGUE OF CATTLE. 



be added that a disease was certainly propagated in the army herds 

 operating in the States near the Gulf of Mexico, but it was the Texas 

 fever only, in which the lungs are unaffected, and from this there is left 

 no infection which has hitherto survived the frosts of a Northern 

 winter. 



No one will deny that in the late civil war there was as great an array 

 of fighting men as in the most extensive wars of Europe 5 that the 

 armies required as great a supply of beef as the armies of Europe ; that 

 they operated over as wide a country, and that in the general absence 

 of the macadamized roads of Europe the herds of supply were subjected 

 to as great privations as those of the European armies ; and yet we have 

 before us the undeniable fact that the States which formed the main 

 theater of the war came out unaffected by the lung plague which has so 

 often proved a disastrous sequel to the wars of Europe. 



Then, as regards the ordinary cattle trade, it must be borne in mind 

 that except during the exigencies of war no cattle are allowed to pass 

 from Eussia into Prussia or Austria without detention and quarantine. 

 Counting, then, from Kamienietz, the eastern point of Austria, to Botter- 

 dam, or from Memel, the eastern point of Prussia, to the Hague, we 

 have in neither case over 1,000 miles, while from the plains of Nebraska 

 or Kansas to Boston is 1,500 miles, and from Texas or Montana 2,000 

 miles. Surely, if the fatigues and privations of travel can develop this 

 disease de novo, it is in the United States that it ought to appear, and 

 not in Europe. But we find, on the contrary, that though our Texas and 

 Montana cattle often die in great numbers during the journey, they never 

 develope a virus which propagates a contagious disease of the lungs in 

 the herds among which they come. Thus Chicago, which received con- 

 signments of 1,382,477 head of cattle in 1880, where the local herds 

 come up to the stockyards and occasionally mix with cattle in transit, 

 and where consignments to the stockyards are fed in city distillery sta- 

 bles and pastured on the open prairie in company with the city dairy 

 herds, presented not a single case of lung plague in the city dairies nor 

 in the distillery stables, though both were subjected to repeated exami- 

 nation. The city of Buffalo, receiving yearly over 700,000 head of 

 cattle, presents no case of lung plague in the dairy or distillery herds, 

 which are constantly recruited from the public stockyards and come 

 in contact with the cattle passing from these yards to slaughter. The 

 same is true of all the great centers of cattle traffic in the West, as also 

 of the country grazing districts supplied with Western cattle west of 

 the Alleghanies, and finally of the whole of New England, including 

 the city of Boston, which receives yearly consignments of about 200,000 

 head of cattle from the West. The fact that a single importation of four 

 Dutch cows into Massachusetts implanted a plague which it cost six 

 years and over $77,000 to eradicate, while this State yearly receives 

 about 200,000 head of Western cattle without the evidence of a single 

 case of lung plague, speaks volumes for the soundness of the stock and 

 the harmlessness of the journey. 



LUNG PLAGUE NOT GENERATED DE NOVO BY IMPURE AIR. 



Many believe that this plague is but the result of impure air in the 

 small, confined, and filthy cow-houses too often found in the large cities. 

 This appears to gain some color of support from the constant prevalence 

 of the affection around certain large cities in both the Old World and 

 the New. But these great cities are also the great centers of cattle 

 traffic, and are besides subjected to all those inimical causes in connection 



