10 THE LUNG PLAGUE OF CATTLE. 



thrown on the British market and sold to the unsuspecting British 

 farmer. 



In 1842, the year of the reduction of the import duty, the lung disease 

 was first recognized in England in the vicinity of London, and it grad- 

 ually spread from market to market and from county to county, until 

 the greater portion of the island was ravaged by the pestilence. From 

 this time onward Great Britain was placed between two fires one 

 reaching her through her Irish trade and the other through her conti- 

 nental one. 



Mr. Robert Herbert, writing in 1860 in the Eoyal Agricultural So- 

 ciety's Journal, in speaking of the continental trade, gives illustrative 

 examples, in which, oat of large purchases of hundreds of animals by 

 single feeders, one-fourth and upward perished of lung plague, and sig- 

 nificantly adds "that very few graziers are to be met with who, from 

 past experience, would run the risk of endeavoring to fatten foreign 

 stock upon any description of land." The lung plague reached Edin- 

 burgh, Scotland, in November, 1843, on the occasion of the great au- 

 tumn market, All Sallow Fair. It was not until 1844, 1845, and 1846 

 that the infection reached many of the agricultural counties distant 

 from large markets, such as Norfolk, Lincolnshire, Derbyshire, Lanca- 

 shire, Yorkshire, and Northumberland, and above all the breeding 

 counties of Gloucester, Hereford, and Devon. Some counties in the 

 highlands of Scotland, and some districts in the Cheviots,- which breed 

 their own stock, and never introduce strange cattle, have escaped the 

 infection up to the present day. In other words, the great centers of 

 cattle traffic London, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds, Shef- 

 field, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perth, Aberdeen, and Inverness 

 were early infected, because to these diseased animals gravitated. The 

 outlying country districts were visited later ; and as cattle from the 

 great markets were introduced, while those districts which bred their 

 own stock, and sold, but never bought, in most cases escaped, and still 

 maintain their immunity after a period of forty years. This speaks with 

 trumpet tongue for the introduction of the germ as an essential pre- 

 requisite to the disease. 



WHY THE LUNG PLAGUE HAS NOT DIED OUT IN IRELAND. 



In England the persistence of the plague for these forty years was a 

 foregone conclusion, because at all the great centers of population were 

 extensive cattle markets open to all alike fat and lean, home and for- 

 eign and as these were receiving daily accessions of infection from 

 Ireland or the continent, or both, this infection was constantly being 

 carried out from these marts by the store cattle purchased there, and 

 served to form new plague centers in all parts of the country. So un- 

 erringly did this operate that the widest extension of the plague always 

 followed on the great markets for store cattle. Thus, there was inva- 

 riably the greatest extension of the disease in the autumn after the 

 farmers had laid in their store cattle for winter feeding. 



But in Ireland the case was different. There being there no great 

 manufacturing centers, no great concentration of population, there was 

 no demand for beef more than could be easily supplied by the home 

 herds; there was accordingly no importation of foreign stock; the only 

 exception to this rule being in the case of a few high-classed animals 

 introduced for the improvement of the native herds. Ireland, like the 

 United States, is essentially a beef-exporting country, and it was to 

 have been presumed that this plague introduced into one corner of her 



