xxxiv Introduction. 



thirty years without any attempt worthy of the name having been 

 made to check them, though they were, and are now, of a preventible 

 nature, and spread solely through the medium of infectious or con- 

 tagious principles. The losses from only two exotic bovine maladies 

 (' contagious pleuro-pneumonia ' and the so-called ' foot and mouth dis- 

 ease' ) have been estimated to amount, during the thirty years that have 

 elapsed since our ports were thrown open to foreign cattle, to 5,549,780 

 head, roughly valued at ,^83,616,854. The late Invasion of 'Cattle 

 Plague,' which was suppressed within two years of its introduction, has 

 been calculated to have caused a money loss of from five to eight millions 

 of pounds. But these examples and estimates, after all, give but a slender 

 idea of the devastation, misery, embarrassment, and loss that has been 

 due to our ignorance, apathy, and neglect of the teachings of veterinary 

 and sanitary science, which must, nevertheless, claim the merit of 

 having conclusively demonstrated that the most formidable diseases can 

 be readily repressed or altogether abolished, though not by attempting 

 to cure them j and having done so, nothing remains for these sciences 

 to accomplish than to indicate the steps necessary to make the legis- 

 lation of a wise Government effective in its dealings with animal plagues 

 in sreneral. 



