UNIVERSITY 



REPORT 



OF 



THE TKEASURY CATTLE COMMISSION 



ox 



THE LUNG PLAGUE OF CATTLE, OR CONTAGIOUS 

 PLEURO-PNEUMONIA. 



The Hon. CHAS. J. FOLGKER, 



Secretary of the Treasury : 



SIR : In presenting a report which we hope may not be altogether 

 fruitless in securing or shaping legislation, we cannot close our eyes to 

 the fact that many legislators are entirely ignorant of the plague of 

 which we are treating, while others who have heard something of its 

 prevalence are still in some doubt as to its contagious properties. We 

 have therefore judged it desirable to enter somewhat fully into the his- 

 tory of the disease in the Old World and the New, and in the Northern 

 and Southern Hemispheres, so as to illustrate its purely contagious 

 nature, its insidious progress, its destructive tendency, and the circum- 

 stances in which it has been respectively possible and impossible to ex- 

 tirpate it from an infected land. This was the more necessary in order 

 to connect the disease as now existing in the United States with that 

 imported in 1848, and to show the reasons for our comparative immunity 

 from great extensions and losses in the past, and the increasing dangers 

 of such diffusion and loss in the future. 



We have kept steadily in view the main object of our appointment, 

 and have fully established the claim that the Western and Southern 

 States, as well as the whole of New England, are free from this disease, 

 and have set forth the conditions under which we believe that the 

 cattle of these States could be shipped to Europe with a perfect guar- 

 antee of soundness as regards this plague. Finally, convinced that any 

 permanent guarantee of continued immunity for our as yet uninfected 

 States, and our export cattle, can only be secured by the extirpation of 

 this disease from the continent, we have set forth those measures which, 

 in the light of history and science, are the best calculated to secure its 

 speedy and thorough extinction. 



NOMENCLATURE. 



It would be useless to furnish a long list of synonyms, yet it is well 

 to note that in all lands this disease has been known by designations 

 such as plague, epizootic, distemper, &c., which showed that it was rec- 

 ognized as something more than a simple inflammation of the lungs, and 



