History of Animal Plagues. 303 



Dr Lavard, writing to Sir Joseph Banks, President of the 

 Royal Society, in 1780, mentions, amongst other matters, the 

 outbreak in Hampshire. ' In consequence of the essay which I 

 published in T756, I was called upon in 1769 by Government to 

 assist with mv advice towards the stopping the progress of the 

 contagious distemper among the cattle, which had broken out in 

 Hampshire ; and by mere accident I discovered how the infec- 

 tion was brought from Holland to London, and was conveyed 

 into that country. Speedily and effectually to extirpate the 

 calamity, no assistance was permitted to visit the infected 

 villages, lest the farmers should be induced to prolong the ill- 

 ness by attempting to cure their cattle; but positive orders were 

 issued that all the cattle should be killed, and buried properly, 

 by which vigorous and salutary directions, the distemper ceased 

 entirely in a short time. The same Acts of Parliament and 

 Orders of Council, to kill the cattle and bury them deep, suc- 

 ceeded also soon after in North Britain ; and to the former 

 Acts and Orders, issued in his late Majesty King George the 

 H.^s reiirn, these alterations were made : in order that the in- 

 fectcd cattle should be killed, without effusion of blood, by 

 strangling; the hides to be neither cut nor slashed, but the car- 

 cases buried whole ; and that all the fodder, litter, excrement, 

 &c,, should be buried, instead of being burned. Since that time, 

 the contagious distemper has been brought twice into Essex, 

 and once into Suffolk, from Holland, and as often stopped by 

 the same means. His Majesty having most graciously been 

 pleased in April, 1770, to appoint me to hold a foreign corre- 

 spondence, the orders and regulations which had happily suc- 

 ceeded in Great Britain were communicated to the Dutch, the 

 Flemish, and the French, and copies of all papers delivered to 

 Baron Nolcken, the Swedish minister. In Flanders, and Picardy 

 in France, the system of killing was adopted, and succeeded. 

 Afterwards, in 1774, when the same contagion was carried into 

 the south of France from Holland through Bordeaux, many at- 

 tempts having failed to effect a cure, the devastation was at last 

 stopped by no other means than by killing the cattle, as in Great 

 Britain. And here I beg to observe, that Mons. Vicq d'Azyr, in 

 his Exposd (Its Moyens Curat'tfset Prescrvatifs contrc Ics Maladies 



