124 DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



amount of whatever they excrete; and thns i)astures are coutaniinated, 

 the grasses of wliieh prove deadly poisons to healthy and susceptible 

 cattle. It is certain that the feeding- of cattle on the land over which 

 Texan animals h ive passed is the ordinary, and probablj' invariable, 

 canso of s])l(Miic fever. 



The circiuustances under which the disease manifests itself tend to 

 favor the view that it is allied to the numerous forms of anthrax fever, 

 which prevail very generally in hot countries, and usually in low lands. 

 These diseases, it is true, are scattered throughout the temperate zone ; 

 but their development depends upon heat, wherever it appears on stiff, 

 retentive soils ; and in some sandy but fertile lands, their ravages are 

 especially witnessed during wet seasons. Heat favors and creates the 

 manifestations of splenic fever. The malady springs in a warm country, 

 and is propngated most readilj- with heat and drought. It is indigenous 

 where vegetation is rank, and the soil charged with an excess of organic 

 life, which, for want of direction, tends to waste and mischief. During 

 the hot summer months, anthrax or carbuncular fevers force the stock- 

 owniers of Southern Europe to seek the hills vnth their flocks of sheep 

 and goats; and to disregard this injunction implies, not only the death 

 of their animals, but the. destruction of other warm-blooded creatures, 

 including man himself, by malignant pustule. To this category undoubt- 

 edly belonged the various pests of old ; and, by traveling northward, 

 the virulence of these diseases, the development of the anthrax poison, 

 and the propagation under any circumstances, by contagion, diminish 

 by simple and imperceptible gradations, and ultimately cease. The 

 black water of Great Britain and of America is one of the forms of this 

 deadly anthrax, which, even so far north as Aberdeen, in Scotland, has 

 been conununicated, by the flesh eaten, to a whole family of human 

 beings, who succumbed from malignant pustule. The Siberian boil plague 

 is one of the typical forms of anthrax, and its history in relation to 

 splenic fever is interesting, inasmuch as it occurs in a vast country, 

 where stock is driven in masses from the east westward ; and an oppor- 

 tunity is thus afforded for contagious transmission, which is not often 

 witnessed elsewhere. 



Many so-called blood diseases, all enzoi3tic in their nature, and capable 

 of limited transmission, are classitied, by the ablest veterinary patholo- 

 gists of France and Germany, with the anthrax fevers. In Germany 

 the most destructive forms are so often characterized by enlargement, 

 softening, and even rupture of the spleen, that the forms of anthrax are 

 included under a generic term, " Milzbrand." The condition of the si>leeu 

 in si)lenic fever would induce many a i)ath()logist to classify it unhesita- 

 tingly among the forms of "Milzl)rand." Ihit there is a line of demarca- 

 tion wliich, in my opinion, can be fairly established. 



Southern cattle, capal»le of propagating this disease, usually start 

 from their homes in the winter, or early in spring. They do not die, as 

 is always the case where anthrax originates, in large numbers so as to 



