522 History of Animal Plagues. 



without effect On those plantations where care was taken 



to burn the carcases of the diseased cattle, no further conse- 

 quences resulted. But they unhappily were few. On those 

 where this precaution was not used, and, indeed, it is surprising 

 that it should be used in any, seeing that the disease was new, 

 and its effects unknown, the flesh of the cattle that died being 

 dug up and eaten by the negroes, proved most dreadfully septic, 

 producing a pestilential carbuncle, attended by a malignant fever. 

 There were not wanting instances of the iniquitous practice of 

 offering the flesh of the diseased cattle for sale, and on these 

 occasions, such was the highly septic nature of this poison, that 

 even touching the flesh, in such manner as that part of the sanies 

 adhered to the finger, produced the same fatal consequence. . . . 

 It will be considered a very extraordinary fact that the cynanche 

 maligna disappeared a short time after the lues bovina. My 

 friend, Dr John Stewart, who had the best opportunities of see- 

 ing both diseases, for it was chiefly within his practice they oc- 

 curred, writes to me: " I went to Grenada early in 1774, but^ I 

 neither witnessed nor heard of any instance of the cynanche 

 maligna in that island until the end of 1783, nor did it appear 

 after 1786, until I finally left the island in 1797.^^ .... The lues 

 bovina, I have said, is a very rare disease within the tropics. I 

 have been assured by a gentleman long resident in Jamaica, and 

 owner of considerable cattle-pens, that nothing of the kind has, 

 to his knowledge, occurred there; and it is certain neither 

 Brown nor Ling have noticed it in their valuable works : it has 

 appeared in Barbadoes only, as far as I have been able to learn ; 

 and there it seems to have assumed the same alarming aspect, 

 and to have produced the same devastation among the horned 

 cattle, and, in many instances, to have given rise to similar con- 

 sequences among the human race we have found it marked by 

 in Grenada. The learned historiographer of Barbadoes, the 

 Reverend Mr Hughes, gives no information relative to the origin 

 of this distemper in that island, but he thus describes it : 

 "■ Among the distempers which infect the horned cattle, there is 

 one of a very contagious and pestilential kind, for a beast shall 

 seemingly, by his feeding heartily, and in appearance, be other- 

 wise well, yet in a few hours, without any symptom of a pre- 



