SECRETARY'S REPORT. 17 



knowledge of the disease, to grapple with the facts as they are 

 brought to their notice. But in most cases they are not, and 

 they find themselves embarrassed with duties to perform under 

 tlie law, with a jurisdiction limited to town boundaries, with no 

 power to put men under oath to elicit the truth, and during the 

 hesitation and delay, incident, perhaps, to imperfect knowledge 

 of their powers and duties, the disease gets beyond their reach 

 by the driving of animals over the town limits, to the great 

 markets or elsewhere, carrying contagion in their way, and 

 infecting other herds. An animal worth less than twenty-five 

 dollars, may thus, as has been the case the past season, convey 

 the infection to and destroy two or three thousand dollars 

 worth of stock. If the evil ended here, it might be borne ; but 

 each animal so infected may go out into the community and 

 become a new centre for the distribution of the disease. The 

 injury has no fixed limit, unless we suppose every owner df 

 stock too honest to attempt to realize the full value of an 

 animal that he begins to get suspicious of. 



If there could be a cordial and united co-operation on the 

 part of the community, there is still a reasonable certainty that 

 this disease could yet be extirpated. 



It is not too much to say that a small appropriation made by 

 the last legislature, from three to five thousand dollars, would 

 have kept the disease wholly in check, if indeed, it had not 

 entirely eradicated it. Now a moderate estimate of the losses 

 during the past season, to individuals, the towns and the State, 

 would be at least ten thousand dollars, and in all probability 

 they have been twice or three times that sum. 



But a far more serious consideration than the actual losses 

 which have already occurred, is the fact that the disease has 

 got so much farther beyond control. 



There would seem to be no longer any reasonable doubt that 

 the disease is contagious and dangerous to a very high degree. 

 Every step of its history in this State has shown this to be the 

 case, even if it had not already been well known before, from 

 its history abroad. It is generally conceded that of the 

 animals exposed, some twenty or thirty per cent., say about 

 twenty-five per cent, on an average, will die. About twenty-five 

 per cent, will take the disease and still live, but in a condition 

 worse than death, so far as any profitable use is concerned. 

 3* 



