3o6 History of Aiiinial Plagues. 



' Others have positively declared it to be a pestilential putrid 

 fever, owing to a corrupted atmosphere, and arising from in- 

 fected pastures; but unfortunately for the supporters of this 

 opinion, while the contagious distemper raged with the utmost 

 violence on the coasts of Friesland, North and South Holland, 

 Zealand, and Flanders, there was not the least appearance of it 

 on the English coast, from the North Foreland to the Humber, 

 although the coast and climate are the same. I shall not dwell 

 on Mr Turherville Needham's elegant discourse read at Brussels, 

 since he must have been convinced, when he came to England 

 in 1776, that the illness was of another sort than he imagined; 

 for such a proof of the efficacy of salt, recommended by him as an 

 antiseptic in this disease, has been given as is positive and deci- 

 sive, namely, that in Scania, a province in Sweden, where it is 

 customary to place a large piece of rock-salt, called salt stein, in 

 water, for the cattle housed to drink, all the cattle in that pro- 

 vince were seized with the contagious distemper, and not one 

 outlived it. Mons. Paulet, in his " Recherches sur les Maladies 

 Epizootiques,^^ vol. ii. pp. 25, 26, Paris, 1776, has sufficiently ex- 

 plained Mr Needham's opinion. M. Bergius had insisted that 

 the contagion was not of the exanthematous sort, and there- 

 fore inoculation must be of no use ; but this opinion was also 

 fully refuted by the late Professor Erxleben, of Gottingen, in his 

 learned oration on the 20th of October, 1770. From every in- 

 formation, domestic or foreign, and comparing the several 

 opinions, experience and observation plainly and completely de- 

 termine the dispute. The disease among the horned cattle, so 

 fatal in many countries, is not endemical or natural to Europe, 

 although it is become so in Denmark from spreading all over 

 the Danish dominions, and its long continuance in that king- 

 dom. It is an eruptive fever of the variolous kind (in a letter 

 from Mons. Vicq d'Azyr to Dr Layard, dated Paris, August 28, 

 1780, is the following declaration: " II me paroit comme a vous 

 que c'est toujours la meme maladie qui a regne depuis 1711 ; 

 et qii'elle a de grands rapports avec I' eruption varioleuse") ; and 

 notwithstanding the exanthemata, or pustules, may have been 

 frequently overlooked, yet none ever recovered without more ojr 

 less eruption or critical abscesses; but these differ from the pesti- 



