54 RINDERPEST, 



on garbled statements of the views of these writers, sought 

 to sustain the theory of the recurrence of the English mur- 

 rains of the last century, and their reappearance in this. 



But we are disposed to move to a further standpoint, and 

 to add that if English writers could confuse or mistake obser- 

 vations on malignant distempers occurring in their own 

 country, within the period of a century and a half; it is a fair 

 inference that continental and classic writers may have 

 labored under similar misapprehensions in regard to the iden- 

 tity of the various pests which have devastated flocks and 

 herds in different ages. 



On mere grounds of probability, we might impeach the 

 calculation that during the last century alone, twenty-eight 

 million head of cattle in Germany ; and in the whole of 

 Europe, including Eussia, but excluding Siberia and Tartary, 

 two hundred millions had fallen victims to the Einderpest, 

 (as these statements are presented in a report to Her Majes- 

 ty's government, by Mr. Blackwell, British vice-consul at 

 Lubec) ; when we consider that Europe has been afflicted 

 with epizootic hydrothorax, dysentery and catarrhal fever, 

 in addition to the other distempers we have before enumer- 

 ated, and one prevalent in Hungary, called blood plague 

 (2 Eep., 29) ; and that her cattle, as well as human population, 

 in many localities, have suffered great mortality in bad sea- 

 sons for maturing and harvesting crops ; from damaged, 

 sprouted or ergotized* grain. 



l!^ow while we are in hand, let us push this investigation to 

 remoter regions and times, and enquire what reasons exist for 

 imagining that the distempers which scourged the continent 

 for a hundred years, commencing at the latter part of the 

 seventeenth century, were in any important particulars, phy- 

 siologically akin to the Pest. 



Eammazini, so often quoted in affirmation of this view, 

 has left in his dissertation on the distemper which broke out 

 in the Venitian territory, especially in the neighborhood of 

 Padua, but a meagre substratum on which to found any such 



* By this phrase '' ergotized/' we mean to denote the parasitical growth ot eUlthe fungi which 

 infest cereals, &c. 



