142 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



Massachusetts a few years since, lias established for itself fixed 

 stations — north, south, east and even west — whence it should be 

 effectually and at once driven by appropriate measures. It is 

 this above all other tasks I should wish to co-operate in, if only 

 to prove to my own countrymen that the mingled feelings of 

 regret and indignation which the physician tells us he experi- 

 ences when he witnesses the ravages of typhus and smallpox, 

 can be shared by me in relation to a malady which, but for the 

 cupidity of some, the ignorance of others and the weakness of 

 governments, would long ere this have been cleared out eifect- 

 ually from the British realm. I have been honored by the con- 

 fidence of your commissioner of agriculture, and believe I can 

 lay claim to as much at the hands of the committee of agricul- 

 ture in Washington. It is for your interest, gentlemen, and for 

 the interest of the entire continent, and beyond the Isthmus 

 down to Patagonia, that science should no longer be gagged and 

 starved, and that rational, complete and decisive measures be 

 adopted to place the outbreaks of contagious pleuro-pneumonia 

 amongst the things that were. I shall say nothing now about 

 the Old World. The time has come for reaction there, and I yet 

 hope to strike home a wedge that first cracked a crevice under 

 my hands fourteen or fifteen years since. 



Col. Wilder. I should be iincourteous, and I may say un- 

 grateful, as Prof. Gamgee has alluded to the fact tliat I have 

 had the pleasure, in Boston, of tasting specimens of meats pre- 

 served by his system, did I not respond in a word. 



The Massachnsetts Agricultural Club were honored, in the 

 early part of last April, I think it was, with the presence of 

 Prof. Gamgee as a guest, when he presented us with a fine leg 

 of mutton, cooked at the Parker House, which he informed us 

 had been preserved in London in October, and came out in a 

 dry box, without any other preparation or care, to New York. 

 We had on the table, the same day, a very fine leg of mutton of 

 our own growth ; and, to our astonishment, we found that the 

 leg which we had from Prof. Gamgee was more juicy, was riper, 

 than the other, and was, in fact, a first-rate leg of mutton, in 

 perfect preservation. He has alluded to the color. It had a 

 deep, florid, beautiful color, surpassing that of the fresh leg. It 



