HGRIC. 

 .WBRARV 



FIRST REPORT 



>.l 



New York State Agricultural Society, 



Executive Board, March 2^th, 1866. 



The committee of the Society appointed to investigate the statis- 

 tics and pathology of the Rinderpest,'"and to suggest preventive and 

 remedial methods for the protection of the State from its ravages, beg 

 leave, by way of preliminary report, and in brief outline, to submit to 

 the consideration of the Executive Board, those facts and conclusions 

 which, in the judgment of the committee, justify the establishment by 

 law of an efficient system of sanitary measures to prevent the intro- 

 duction and dissemination of this terrific malady. 



Your committee have had access to many foreign journals, agricul- 

 tural and medical, which in every issue are filled with statements of 

 the destructive career of this plague, and mostly, with humiliating 

 admissions of general failure to arrest its spread or establish any 

 efficient system of cure. Your committee have also been favored 

 through the Secretary of the Society, with copies of the first and 

 second reports of the commissioners, appointed by Royal Commis- 

 sion €o investigate the origin and nature of the cattle plague ; and 

 the reports prepared on the pathological appearances and symptoms 

 of the disease by Dr. Smart, of Edinburgh, which were with great 

 kindness and dispatch forwarded to the Secretary by Prof. Johi^^ 

 Wilson, F. R. S. E., Professor of Agriculture in the University of 

 Edinburgh. 



It appears that as far back as October 21st, 1865, a period of rather 

 more than four months after the introduction of this disease into 

 Islington, 14,083 animals had been attacked; 6,711 had died; 5,119 

 slaughtered ; only 707 had recovered, and 1,546 remained under 

 treatment. Since that time the statistics of enumerated cases had 

 disclosed the appalling figures of 9,120 attacked in one week, ending 



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