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CHAPTER II. 



ERRONEOUS POPULAR NOTIONS ABOUT DISEASE. 



LAST winter I published a pamphlet about the 

 Cattle Plague. I endeavoured in it to show that 

 most of the popular ideas about diseases and con- 

 tagion are either wrong- or exaggerated ; that Miss 

 Nightingale was right when she ridiculed the notion 

 of diseases being so many separate positive entities, 

 only to be reproduced from themselves, as if they 

 were organized beings like a cat or a dog ; and that 

 dirt, vice, or the transgression of nature's intentions 

 will produce any disease ; that every cause must have 

 its effect ; that every departure from right in this 

 world must have its consequence, and must be paid 

 for either in person or vicariously ; that diseases can- 

 not be separated by hard decided lines as usually 

 supposed ; but that they dovetail into each other with 

 infinite and indefinite complications like colours j 

 that although there are bay horses and brown horses 

 there are also many that are as much one as the 

 other, whilst sometimes a horse has to be described in 

 racing entries as either grey or roan, or black or 

 chesnut or brown ; that is to say, a complication of 

 all colours. I pointed out that the majority of farmers 

 in winter keep their cattle in an unhealthy manner : 

 those for the butcher overfed, the others underfed, 



