History of Animal Plagues. 457 



may be permitted to use the flesh and remove the skin. But if 

 there is found the slightest cause for suspicion in the lungs, the 

 skin oucrht to be cut crosswise, and buried in a grave six feet deep, 

 which should then be tilled with lime. Palisades should be fixed 

 around it, so that no animal mav come near. If the disease is really 

 a pneumonia, it is preferable not to doctor it, but to kill without 

 delay the first animals which, from their cough, would lead one to 

 suspect the disease, or those which have been in the same stable 

 with the sick; because we may set down as lost, without excep- 

 tion, every animal which has been in a house with a pulmonic 

 beast. Experience has only too often demonstrated that they take 

 the disease one after the other, and all die. This operation shall 

 be performed in the same way, and with the greatest care, when 

 animals have perished from a suspected disease without its being 

 decidedly contagious. Their flesh may be used, and the skins pre- 

 served, provided they are at once carried to the tanners. The skins 

 of the really diseased must be cut and buried w'xxh. the bodies in a 

 deep pit full of lime. When the loss is considerable, the Sove- 

 reion usually causes a collection to be made for those proprietors 

 whose cattle have, lor the sake of security, been sacrificed for the 

 public good. 



II. 



'When many stables are infected in the same village, the 

 danger is yet greater, and it is here that it is necessary to re- 

 double our eff'orts to prevent the spread of the contagion. All 

 the infected stiibles should be carefully closed, and excluded from 

 all communication with the watering-places and the pasturage ; 

 and in serious cases, to make more certain, we should kill all the 

 animals which have been in the infected places, no less those in 

 apparent health than those in which disease is manifest. We 

 are driven to this severe recourse, because we never can be assured 

 that those animals which have come out of suspicious places 

 have escaped the contagion. This apparent cruelty is the only 

 means to be employed for preventing the contagion from pene- 

 trating into other stables and into neighbouring villages, and 

 from spreading over the whole of a country. 



' The case is vet more dantrerous when the coutaiiion niani- 



