5!24 FHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [aNNO 1/80. 



Holland to London, and was conveyed into that county. Speedily and effectually 

 to extirpate the calamity, no assistance was permitted to visit the infected vil- 

 lages, lest the farmers should be induced to prolong the illness, by attempting to 

 cure their cattle ; but positive orders were issued that all the cattle should be 

 killed and buried properly, by which vigorous and salutary directions the distem- 

 per ceased entirely in a sliort time. The same acts of parliament and orders of 

 council, to kill the cattle and bury them deep, succeeded also soon after in 

 North Britain ; and to the former acts and orders issued in his late Majesty's 

 reign, the^e alterations were made : to order that the infected cattle should be 

 killed, without effusion of blood, by strangling ; the hides to be neither f;ut nor 

 slashed ; but the carcases buried whole ; and that all the fodder, litter, excre- 

 ment, &c. should be buried, instead of being burned. Since ttiat time the con- 

 tagious distemper had been brought twice into Essex, and once into Suffolk, 

 from Holland, and as often stopped by the same means. 



The orders and regulations which had happily succeeded in Great Britain were 

 communicated to the Dutch, the Flemish, and the French, and copies of all 

 papers delivered to Baron Nolcken, the Swedish minister. In Flanders, and 

 Picardy in France, the system of killing was adopted, and succeeded. After 

 wards in 1774, when the same contagion was carried into the south of France 

 from Holland through Bourdeaux, many attempts had failed to effect a cure, 

 the devastation was at last stopped by no other means than by killing the cattle, 

 as in Great Britain. In Flanders the infection was also prevented from spread- 

 ing a 2d time by the same method of proceeding ; but unfortunately in Holland 

 the cattle continued to be exposed to the same disease. The half-3early returns 

 which had been regularly sent, contained melancholy accounts of the severe loss 

 of cattle ; sometimes the whole had perished ; at other times f had died ; and 

 generally above half fell when the sickness was violent. In a country where the 

 illness was become general, and constantly raging more or less, where the sys- 

 tem of killing the cattle could not then be thought of, and where inoculation had 

 met with so many opponents of all ranks, there could be no other hope of getting 

 rid of the calamity than by admitting into the United Provinces no other cattle 

 but such as were sound, or recovered from the infection. 



In Denmark, where the contagious distemper was become naturalized and 

 general, the Danish government had not only wisely adopted the orders and 

 regulations issued in Great Britain, but had with unwearied application pursued 

 the practice of inoculation. Count Bernsdorff and Dr. Struensee liad all the 

 necessary instructions, books, and papers, delivered to them when the King of 

 Denmark was in England ; inoculation was approved, recommended, and by 

 authority established. Even in the first 3 years that inoculation was practised, 

 of near 300 head of cattle which were inoculated in a Danish island, not a 6th 



