NATURAL AND CASUAL COW-POX. 317 



Propagation by the Hand of the Milker. Ceely was able to confirm 

 the way in which the disease was said to spread. In December 

 1838, on a large dairy farm, w^here there were three milking-sheds r 

 cow-pox broke out in the home or lower shed. The cows in this 

 shed being troublesome, the milker from the upper shed, after 

 milking his own cows, came to assist in this for several days, morning 

 and evening, when in about a week some of his own cows began to 

 exhibit the disease. It appears that, having chapped hands, he 

 neglected washing them for three or four days at a time, and thus 

 conveyed the disease from one shed to another. During the progress 

 of the disease through this shed, one of the aft'ected cows, which had 

 been attacked by the others, was removed to the middle shed, where 

 all the animals were perfectly well. This cow, being in an advanced 

 stage of the disease, and of course difficult to milk and dangerous 

 to the milk- pail, was milked first in order by the juvenile milker for 

 three or four days only, when, becoming unmanageable by him, its 

 former milker was called in to attend exclusively to it. In less than 

 a week, all the animals of this shed showed symptoms of the disease, 

 though in a much milder degree than it had appeared in the other 

 sheds, fewer manipulations having been performed by an infected 

 hand. 



Topical Symptoms of the Natural Disease. For these, Ceely was- 

 almost always, in the early stage, compelled to depend on the obser- 

 vations and statements of the milkers. They stated that for three 

 or four days, without any apparent indisposition, they noticed heat 

 and tenderness of the teats and udder, followed by irregularity and 

 pimply hardness of these parts, especially about the bases of the 

 teats and adjoining the vicinity of the udder ; these pimples on skins 

 not very dark are of a red colour, and generally as large as a vetch 

 or a pea, and quite hard, though in three or four days many of 

 these increase to the size of a horse-bean. Milking is genera lly 

 very painful to the animal ; the tumours rapidly increase in size, 

 vesicate, and are soon broken by the hands of the milker. Milking 

 now becomes a troublesome and occasionally a dangerous process 

 Ceely adds: "It is very seldom that any person competent to 

 judge of the nature of the ailment has access to the animal before 

 the appearance of the disease on others of the herd, when the cow 

 first affected presents on the teats acuminated, ovoid, or globular 

 vesications, some entire, others broken, not infrequently two or three 

 interfluent ; those broken have evidently a central depression with 

 marginal induration ; those entire, being punctured, diffuse a more 

 or less viscid amber-coloured fluid, collapse, and at once indicate the 



