SPECIAL MEETING. 17 



men of the town were concerned, they thought they had a 

 serious outbreak of contagious pleuro-pneumonia there. 

 There has not been a year, as I say, when the Cattle Com- 

 missioners have not heard complaints of cases of contagious 

 pleuro-pneumonia. Ever since 1868 our Board have been 

 cognizant of the fact that contagious pleuro-pneumonia was 

 in the country ; we have known it absolutely. We knew 

 when it was among the swill-milk stables in New York in 

 1868, and soon after that it spread from those swill-milk 

 stables to one of the counties in the southwestern part of 

 Connecticut. Our Board were very much alarmed then be- 

 cause we were apprehensive that it would find its way into 

 Massachusetts. We met the Commissioners of Connecticut, 

 we made an examination of the case down there, and they 

 got it out of Connecticut by running the cattle back into the 

 State of New York and killing them just as they were taken 

 out of the cars. There have been complaints during the last 

 year that pleuro-pneumonia existed in the State of Connecti- 

 cut, but I have every reason to believe that it was ordinary 

 lung complaint, tuberculosis, or some form of pulmonary 

 disease. But at the same time in all these years it has ex- 

 isted in Brooklyn, N. Y., and in the last four or five years it 

 has made its appearance in Pennsylvania in different places, 

 it has got into the District of Columbia, different places in 

 Maryland, and finally it has found its way over the moun- 

 tains to the West. 



Now, the Massachusetts Board of Cattle Commissioners, 

 knowing what has been going on in other States, have over 

 and over again asked the Massachusetts Legislature to 

 memorialize the Legislatures of New York, of New Jersey, 

 of Pennsylvania and of Maryland in relation to this disease, 

 because we knew what it was. The Legislature of Massa- 

 chusetts apparently assumed that the Cattle Commissioners 

 had got to make some kind of a report, and they might as 

 well write that as anything else. You will find, by looldng 

 back in the Massachusetts Agricultural Reports, that year 

 after year the Cattle Commissioners have called the atten- 

 tion of the Legislature to the fact that the genuine, old- 

 fashioned, contagious pleuro-pneumonia that we stamped 

 out existed in several States. We have known it, because 



