43 



swine fever, and would in the ordinary course have been 

 released. In several of these instances instead of being 

 released the swine were, at the request of the committee, 

 slaughtered and the organs sent for examination. In each 

 set of specimens characteristic lesions of swine fever were 

 detected." This view is also supported by the following 

 extract from the Reports of the Bureau of Animal Industry \ &.S. 

 Department of Agriculture, 1895 and 1896, page 165. " The 

 chief carriers of the infection are the swine themselves. The 

 disease having its chief seat in the intestines, a discharge of 

 bacilli from the ulcers of chronic cases or of such as have 

 survived an attack may take place long after the subsidence 

 of an outbreak or after they have changed hands. Infection 

 may thus be carried over in the herd till a neiv susceptible gener- 

 ation of young swine appears to continue the losses. 



" Outbreaks occurring without any traceable importation of 

 infection from without are very probably due to latent in- 

 fection in the herd itself." 



ACTINOMYCOSIS. 



GERMANY. 



(Views of Professor Ostertag.) 



He differs in his views on this disease from most patho. 

 logists. He has never succeeded in reproducing it by 

 inoculation, nor by feeding with diseased tissues. He questions 

 its contagiousness ; the omycets he says are on the grasses, 

 hay or straw and he states that in every case which he 

 examined he found a spear or vegetable substance in the 

 focus of infection. He instanced its occurrence on the udders 

 of swine from specules of straw penetrating the abdominal 

 skin and in this way introducing the omycets ; also its occur- 

 rence in horses' shoulders, and showed a photograph of a 

 tumor caused by the botryomyces. He called our attention 

 to the transverse crevice in the tongues of cattle in which 

 sharp pointed spears of grass or straw will readily lodge and 

 may be the means of introducing the fungi. Asked how he 

 explained the frequency of this disease in cattle fed on 



