6 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



been the exposures of sound animals to the infection, that the 

 most energetic measures were required, and the appropriation 

 was soon exhausted without having fully accomplished the 

 object for which it was made. Under the circumstances it was 

 deemed advisable to call an extra session of the State Board of 

 Agriculture to meet at the State House on the 15th of May. 

 At this meeting. Dr. Loring, as one of the commissioners, laid 

 before the Board the following 



MEMORIAL. 



To the Massachusetts State Board of Agriculture : 



The Commissioners appointed under the Act of the legislature of 

 Massachusetts to extirpate the disease called Pleuro-Pneumonia, now 

 existing in certain towns in the Commonwealth, have been for several 

 weeks endeavoring to accomplish the work assigned them. The dilii- 

 culties under which they labored at the outset were very great. The 

 disease had existed for many months in the locality to which it had been 

 transplanted. By sales and exchange of animals, it had been scattered 

 abroad throughout a section of country whose chief business is agricul- 

 ture, and where the isolation of many of the farms rendered it difficult 

 to trace it. The delay incident to legislation, had complicated and ex- 

 tended the trouble. An entire insufficiency of funds appropriated for 

 the purpose, checked the work of extermination and the unexpected 

 extent of territory which contained the infection, and througli which the 

 Commissioners have been obliged to feel their way, rendered their task 

 perplexing and burdensome to the highest degree. They found, 

 moreover, that beyond a narrow circuit where the disease had done its 

 Avork of actual destruction, the public mind was not aroused to a sense 

 of the danger. The formers who were more remote from the scene 

 of the catastrophe were reposing in confidence, and were even congratu- 

 lating themselves upon their safety, while they were daily inviting tlie 

 incendiary to their homesteads. jSot'.iing but a series of facts, established 

 with great labor and delay l)y the Commissioners, aroused them to a full 

 sense of their danger. And it was not till the certainty of the infection 

 was demonstrated beyond a doubt that they remembered how carelessly 

 tlii'v had ])urchased animals from the original seat of the disease, or had 

 worked their teams in connection with those belonging to a distempered 

 herd, or had fed their cattle in infected stables, or had paused by the 

 roadside to discuss with a neighbor the condition of some sickly creature 

 which was then breathing death into the nostrils of its dumb com- 

 panions. 



