468 History of Animal Plagues. 



cember, 1774, and another of the 30th of January, 1775, 

 ordained that one-third the value of the beasts sacrificed should 

 be reimbursed to the owners. 



During the course of this epizooty, Vicq-d'Azyr made a 

 great number of experiments and observations, the chief results 

 of which should not be overlooked. From these it was inferred 

 that the disease could scarcely be communicated by means of 

 fresh hides taken from the diseased beasts, as these had been 

 used over and over again on the backs of eight cows at four dif- 

 ferent periods without inducing the malady in them; and skins 

 steeped in lime did not communicate the contagion. The in- 

 fected clothes of men, and which had been worn in veterinary 

 infirmaries, had given the disease to three animals out of six. 

 The gases from the intestines, — collected when dead cattle were 

 opened, — enclosed in bladders and introduced into the nostrils of 

 many healthy animals, have caused the manifestation of the dis- 

 ease in about ten, twelve, or fifteen days. Bread steeped in 

 the blood or the bile of an infected animal has communicated 

 the malady in five, six, or eight days. Attempts to transmit 

 the infection by means of frictions, either with the hands impreg- 

 nated with virus, or with hay, or infected skins, were ineffectual. 

 Inoculation had been attended with unfavourable results, as 

 nearly all those experimented upon died, and those in which it 

 was most successful were young animals. When the disease as- 

 sumed a less deadly form, then inoculation was more satisfac- 

 tory in its effects. Inoculation had been tried by Layard, in 

 England; Camper had before-times largely practised it in 

 Holland, and the doctors Koopmann and Sandifort had re- 

 peated these tentatives in the same country. The operation, 

 of course, was employed with the intention of communicating to 

 the cattle a more benignant form of the disease than that which 

 is developed naturally, and thus to secure them against the 

 chances of another attack. But, as we have seen, inoculation 

 was far from being successful in any country in which it has 

 been tried, and with Vicq-d'Azyr nearly all those inoculated 

 succumbed to the disease thus induced in them. Camper 

 and Koopmann were perhaps not so unlucky, for it is said 

 that the former managed to save forty-one out of one hundred 



