20 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



competent and learned veterinarians as well as practical men, 

 all going to show its purely contagious origin. 



I have hefore me now the written opinions on this poii^ of 

 nearly all the veterinary surgeons in Great Britain, several 

 hundred in numher, and, so far as I am aware, not one of them 

 expresses a doubt upon the point. 



When I was in Hamburg, in July last, there convened at 

 that city an International Congress of Veterinary Surgeons, 

 composed of the most distinguished professors and veterina- 

 rians in the world, many of them of the highest scientific 

 attainments, and admitted as such by scientific men in all 

 departments. The profession is not, in Europe, as it has been 

 here, laboring under an unjust proscription of public senti- 

 ment. It attracts to it, therefore, many of the ablest minds 

 and the highest character, men who would adorn any liberal 

 profession by their patient investigations, their ability and their 

 learning. Some of these men I afterwards met in my visits to 

 various agricultural Colleges and Universities in Germany and 

 France. 



To show still farther the high character of that body, I may 

 state that so lively was the interest taken in it by the govern- 

 ments of Europe, that four members were sent to it from 

 Russia, at the public expense^ three from Austria, three from 

 Prussia, and others by the governments of Hanover, Saxony, 

 Bavaria, Wurtemberg, Switzerland, Baden, Denmark, Sweden, 

 <fec., over eighty in all. 



The subject of contagious pleuro-pneumonia was introduced 

 for discussion before this Congress, when it was declared with- 

 out a dissentient voice, that the malady, so far as Western 

 Europe was concerned, was of purely contagious origin. 



Professor Nicklas, of Munich, stated that, " in Bavaria, and 

 all other parts of Central Europe over which his investigations 

 had extended, the lung disease in cattle was purely a con- 

 tagious disease. In Bavaria it had led to an annual mortality 

 of a very serious nature." 



Professor Fuchs, of the University of Heidelberg, drew up 

 a list of contagious diseases which properly came within the 

 scope of legislative enactment, and wished the sense of the 

 Congress in regard to it, as the Grand Duchy of Baden was 

 about revising the laws relating to contagious diseases. Among 



