398 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



provisions of law relating to this disease. When they are 

 notified of cases they are referred to the Board of Health, 

 or the Board is directed to take cognizance of them without 

 the knowledge or intervention of the mayor and aldermen. 

 It may be that it is assumed that as such Boards are em- 

 powered to take measures to abate nuisances and guard the 

 public health, they would therefore have authority to take a 

 horse suspected of being glandered from its owner and destroy 

 it. But their powers extend only to infected persons and 

 things, and it is morally certain that the owner of every 

 horse they destroy has good cause for action against them 

 at law ; and as is provided in section 15, chapter 90, of the 

 Public Statutes, and sections 1 and 2 of chapter 148 of the 

 Acts of 1885, all these persons are liable to fine and impris- 

 onment in every case where they fail to notify the Cattle 

 Commissioners of their knowledge of this contagion. Though 

 without warrant of law Boards of Health have doubtless 

 destroyed some dangerous animals, but the practice tends to 

 secrete a full knowledge of the extent of the disease from 

 the Commissioners, and to weaken or destroy the force of 

 their regrulations. In several instances in the towns indi- 

 viduals whose horses have been legally isolated on suspicion, 

 or condemned as glandered, have secreted or Removed them 

 to other localities before they could be destroyed ; and in 

 'one case the keeper of such a removed horse contracted and 

 died of this loathsome disease. Assuming it to be in the 

 line of our duty, Ave have caused prosecutions to be instituted 

 in two of these cases, where the facts could be proved. One 

 of these has been carried to conviction, and a bill of indict- 

 ment has been preferred by a grand jury in the other, which, 

 on trial, will doubtless lead to the same result. 



Hog Cholera. 

 We have been called to take charge and direct in more 

 than a hundred cases of hog cholera, involving the safety of 

 many hundreds of animals in the infected herds, as well as 

 all the swine stock in the vicinity of their occurrence. 

 While the eastern part of the State has not been exempt 

 from the disease, much the largest proportion of the cases 

 has been in the four western counties. In a former report 



