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after mucli hesitation, allows you to hire a boy with 

 a penny squirt, as a beginning, to prove that water 

 can extinguish fire, and then, this simple fact esta- 

 blished, directly you urge the hire of a powerful steam 

 fire-engine to take up the work of extinction in earnest, 

 shudders at the expense and will hear nothing further 

 on the subject. 



But to return : Prevention is better than cure, and 

 desirable, nay essential, as it will become later to dis- 

 seminate correct veterinary knowledge amongst Indian 

 agriculturists, and place sound advice on all matters 

 connected with the treatment of cattle in health as 

 well as in disease, within every villager's reach, the 

 first thing clearly is to attack the root of the evil and 

 to mitigate the intensity of those causes to which 

 three-fourths of the mortality anaongst Indian cattle 

 are primarily due. 



It is the hot-weather privations that have first to be 

 dealt with. 



Now, no doubt, it may seem easy to deal with this. 

 European agriculturists will say, " What simpler ? 

 Grow sorgho, Guinea grass, &c. &c.," and probably 

 twenty years hence, when the Agricultural Department 

 gets a real hold upon the country and the people, and 

 other changes to be hereafter foreshadowed have come 

 about, this ivill be done to a certain extent. But at 

 present the condition of the people is such that it is 

 doubtful whether even the most stringent legislation, 

 worked by the most energetic executive, would secure 

 any such general growth of hot-weather forage as 

 would, taking the country as a whole, materially 

 ameliorate the miserable lot of our cattle. 



