260 THE DISEASES AND DISORDERS OF THE OX. 



Stamp it out immediately. The disease is established, and 

 seems to have originated, in the far East. Its Asiatic source has 

 been traced, and G-erlach mentions the Russo-Asiatic Steppes 

 as the regions in which the malady was possibly primarily 

 developed. The question of the distribution of disease in the 

 world in these recent times, when the dependence of specific 

 maladies on the minute vegetable organisms called germs has 

 been proved, is seen to be a point of greater significance than 

 was previously recognised. 



Speaking generally of diseases, we may say that they seem 

 to lose gradually something of their virulence. Animals become 

 in greater or less degree used to them, as it were. In relation 

 to cattle-plague, for instance, it has been observed that when 

 the disease comes regularly to a country, it seems to be less 

 fatal in character, while if, on the contrary, some interval of 

 time has elapsed since its last appearance, the attacks are of 

 a very severe type. If imported into a region never before 

 invaded, cattle-plague, in common with other scourges, is of an 

 especially deadly form. We read in the Veterinarian for 

 March 1887 that cattle-plague existed at that ime in Bess- 

 arabia, Volhynia, Taurida, St. Petersburg, Warsaw, the Don 

 Cossack Territory, and in the neighbourhood of Odessa, and 

 that precautions were being taken at Constantinople to prevent 

 its spread from Odessa. 



Cattle-plague is one of those diseases which are essentially 

 amenable to the " stamping-out " policy, and it will be remem- 

 bered that when the British outbreak occurred in 1865-66, owing 

 to the determined efforts of the authorities, the disease was at 

 length thoroughly expelled from the country. The advice given 

 by the eminent veterinarians of the day, among whom the most 

 able was John Gamgee, was sound and rational. The energetic 

 action taken by the Government, in accordance with this advice, 

 was successful in stamping out the plague, and we feel sure that, 

 should the necessity for prompt measures ever arise again, the 

 invasion would be nipped in the bud even more decisively. 



About June, 1865, the plague broke out in England, after 

 the first direct importation from Russia, and writing about 

 February, 1866, John Gamgee, in his classical work on cattle- 

 plague, says at the close of his introduction to that treatise : — 

 *' Great, however, as the present calamity is, there are reasons 



