43 



regard to the murrain in England a hundred years 

 ago. 



I know that just now my ideas about these things 

 must seem to most people crotchets ; that is to say, 

 my ideas that stamping out diseases is a delusion ; 

 that sick animals should be left to nature, open fresh 

 air and good food, and that the popular ideas about 

 contagion are partly much exaggerated, and partly 

 sheer nonsense. A hundred years ago denial of the 

 existence of witchcraft was considered by all right 

 thinking people, from Addison downwards, a wrong- 

 headed crotchet. Mr. J. S. Mill says, very truly, 

 the crotchet of one age is the acknowledged truth of 

 the next, and the truism of the third. 



Between two and three hundred years ago 

 Oriental plague was common in London, breaking 

 out violently at different intervals. I have never 

 read that it was stamped out. But I have read 

 that gradually people adopted cleaner and healthier 

 habits, and as we all know, the plague gTadually 

 ceased. 



Even up to thirty years ago people used to talk 

 about Glanders in horses, just as they now do about 

 Rinderpest. Stable habits though still bad enough 

 became far less filthy than they were formerly, and 

 such a thing as glanders is never heard of in Eng- 

 land now. 



Wrong and insufficent feeding, bad air and bad 

 management, each and all get animals into such a 

 state that they are ready for some internal in- 



