History of Animal Plagues. 291 



this distemper's contagion (see An Account of the Present Mor- 

 tality among the Black Cattle, 1745), that the notion of con- 

 tagion may contribute much to the mortahty of the distemper " by 

 putting the dealers in cattle upon an improper method of treatino- 

 it/' This may possibly be true, but it is no argument against 

 the reality of the distemper's contagion. The same improper 

 method has often been deduced from the same principle in the 

 small-pox, and yet nobody will scruple to own that distemper to 

 be contagious. ... I cannot therefore but wish that, instead of 

 patronizing the contrary opinion, this ingenious author had 

 endeavoured to confirm the farmers in their notion of the dis- 

 temper's contagion, and to convince them of the falsity of the 

 inference in respect of its cure which they had been tau2;ht to 

 draw from it. In this case he would have contributed more to 

 the stopping of it by his theory, than either he or any eminent 

 physician upon earth could probably have done during its first 

 violence by any method of practice It is very observ- 

 able that this pestilence among our cattle very much resembles 

 that of Ramazzini in most of its symptoms and effects, as in the 

 stupidity of the beginning, the flux from the nose, the looseness, 

 the shortness of breath, the coagulation of the blood, the crisis 

 which sometimes happens by eruptions (Ramazzini tells us these 

 pustules, which he calls Tuhercula variolariim speciem refereiitia, 

 broke out over the whole body on the 5th or 6th day, and that the 

 cattle generally died — as they do now — about the 5th or 7th; from 

 whence it is probable these eruptions were not symptomatica! 

 but critical, as they arc in the present distemper, wherein scarce 

 any beast that has them dies. It appears, then, that the learned 

 author of the Account, &'c., was mistaken in what he tells us, 

 " that this variolous eruption was the distinguishing mark of the 

 disease described by Ramazzini, and that either he was misin- 

 formed when he said no such eruptions are seen upon the skins 

 of cattle, which are now infected, or that this symptom is one 

 instance of the present mitigation of the distemper's original 

 virulence"), and the dry hard substance constantly found in the 

 Omasum or Paunch, which Raniazzini supposes, but in my 

 opinion unjustly, to be caused by the first imi)ressi()u of the 

 contiigious miasmata on that part. For it appears to nic as if it 



