VALUE OF VETERINARY SCIENCE. 215 



Oramel Martin and Calvin Ellis, and one veterinarian, Dr. 

 J. 11. Stickney, then a young man recently returned from 

 his studies abroad. This Medical Board wrote a report on 

 the nature of the disease, and in it recommended that the 

 United States Government establish quarantine stations for 

 imported cattle at the principal Eastern ports. This sugges- 

 tion was carried out about twenty years later, and the cattle 

 quarantine stations, now under the charge of the Bureau of 

 Animal Industry, established. 



To Dr. Thayer belongs largely the credit of eradicating 

 pleuro-pneumonia in Massachusetts. He was one gf the old- 

 time veterinary practitioners ; not a graduate of a veterinary 

 school, but self-educated, — a man who had read and observed 

 a great deal, and had read and heard of the contagious lung 

 plague of cattle, and recognized it when he saw it, and urged 

 the importance of exterminating it as the only effectual 

 means of getting rid of it. 



In 1861 little was done towards the extirpation of con- 

 tagious pleuro-pneumonia. In 1862, James Ritchie, E. F. 

 Thayer and Henry L. Sabin constituted the Board of Cattle 

 Commissioners, and Dr. Thayer was prominently identified 

 with it for a number of years thereafter. The Cattle Com- 

 missioners, in their annual report for 1865, the commission 

 then being Dr. Thayer and Mr. C. P. Preston of Danvers, 

 conofratulate the State on the " eradication of one of the 

 Avorst forms of contagious disease which has been found 

 among cattle." 



Stamping out contagious pleuro-pneumonia cost the State 

 about $67,500, besides which various towns where it ap- 

 peared expended about $10,000, making a total of $77,500. 

 If it had been allowed to run on unchecked until the present 

 time, there is no estimating what the loss to this State might 

 have been, to say nothing of the damage that it might have 

 inflicted upon sister States. 



We have all read of the Pharisee and ptiblican who went 

 up into the Temple to pray, and know that a man should not 

 take too much sanctity to himself, yet I cannot help feeling 

 that if the States of New York and New Jersey had done 

 their duty as nobly and bravely as the Old Bay State, and 

 put their hands in their pockets to pay for the slaughter ot 



