July 17, 1891.] 



SCIENCE. 



37 



The buildings were such as are to be found on ordinary Iowa 

 farms, fairly comfortable and clean. I could find no clue 

 in the quantity or quality of feed that promised to lead to a 

 solution of the difficulty. 



On investigation of the water supply, I found that most of 

 the animals on the farm drank from a small creek that ran 

 a zigzag course through the premises. The stream was in 

 part supplied from a series of springs, and in ordinary sea- 

 sons afforded a fair amount of water, which ran, at least for 

 a portion of its course, over a gravelly bed. The dry sum- 

 mer of 1890, with several previous ones showing an abnor- 

 mally light rain fall, had so reduced the amount of water 

 that it had ceased to run. On making examination and 

 conducting inquiries, I ascertained that it had been the 

 custom on the farm to throw the carcasses of animals down 

 the steep bluffs into the bed of the stream. I further learned 

 that during the summer, chicken cholera had prevailed on 

 the farm, and that a large number of chickens had died and 

 been thrown over the bank. I was also informed that the 

 hog-cholera had caused the death of a considerable number 

 of swine, the carcasses having been treated in a similar man- 

 ner. The several yards occupied by horses, cattle, pigs, and 

 barn-yard fowls were on the hillside, with abrupt drainage 

 into the creek. In addition to this, large heaps of ferment- 

 ing manure were deposited about the foot of the hill, near 

 the edge of the stream where the animals went to drink. 



A few of the animals on the farm had not had access to 

 the stream, but had been watered from a well. None of 

 these had showed signs of sickness, though they bad been in 

 daily contact with those that had their water from the pools 

 in the bed of the stream, and even with some of the sick. 

 On looking up the local geography of the neighborhood, I 

 found that a number of farmers had built their homes along 

 the banks of this stream, and had been accustomed to make 

 use of it in much the same way as the farmer above referred 

 to. Inquiry elicited the fact that on no less than four farms 

 situated on the banks of this stream, animals had died show- 

 ing symptoms identical with those on the farm first investi- 

 gated. I regarded the evidence as sufficient to make out a 

 strong case against the impurity of the water, and gave an 

 opinion accordingly. 



The above is but a single instance out of many that have 

 come under my observation. It is one of the most glaring, 

 but by no means one attended with the greatest degree of 

 loss. On another occasion where a high rate of mortality 

 had prevailed among the cattle running on the open prairie, 

 I was able to trace the cause to contamination of surface 

 water. An animal, dead from anthrax, had been drawn 

 into a basin on the open prairie. Later the rains filled the 

 basin with water, and about one thousand cattle on the range 

 had access to the pond for water supply. The result was 

 that about ten per cent of all the animals having access to 

 the impure water died from anthrax. The teacliings of 

 these object lessons are sufficiently obvious. These animals 

 are endowed with organizations not unlike our own, and the 

 manifest laws of being and of health can no more be 

 violated with impunity by them than by ourselves. 



THE LAST ENGLISH HOME OF THE BEARDED TIT.' 



In the memoir of the Geological Survey of the country round 

 Cromer [England], is a rough sketch-map of the outline of the 

 north-west comer of Europe as in all pmbability it existed at the 

 newer pliocene period, in the far-off days when the primitive veg- 

 etation and monstrous creatures of a still eai-lier world were slow- 

 ^ T. Digby Pigott, in the Contemporary Review for July. 



ly giving place to plants and animals of " more of the recent " 

 types. 



A great river, since dwindled to the insignificant Rhine, with its 

 mushroom castles and ruins, swept through fir woods and swamps 

 to an estuary hemmed in to the westward by a coast-line unbro- 

 ken, excepting here and there by a tributary stream, to John o' 

 Groat's, rolling down in its sluggish current stumps of trees, and 

 bones of elephants and bears and beavers, to be washed long ages 

 afterwards from the '■ forest- bede " of Sheringham and Runton. 

 The swamps through which the old estuary once cut its way lie 

 buried now in places a hundred feet or more deep, beneath Nor- 

 folk turnip fields and pheasant coverts. 



The fens of the Great Level, which, before Dutch drainers and 

 dyke-builders had reclaimed the second Holland, were perhaps 

 their nearest counterpart in the England of human times, are 

 scarcely less things of the past. The marsh devils, which, until 

 St. Bartholomew interfered and drove them off with a cat-o'-nine- 

 tails, held open court there, and, as Matthew of Paris tells in his 

 " Greater Chronicle," came out in troops to maltreat the few hardy 

 Christian settlers, who, like St. Guthlac, as penance for past wild 

 lives, sought holy retirement there — dragging them, bound, from 

 their cells, and ducking them mercilessly in the black mud, 

 '^ coenosis in kiticibus atrcepaludis " — now cower invisible in the 

 ditches, or sneak out as agues, to be ignominiously exorcised with 

 quinine. Hares and partridges have taken the place of spoonbills 

 and bitterns, and ruffs and reves; and, where a few years ago 

 wild geese swam, ponderous Shire cart-colts gallop, scarcely leav- 

 ing in summer a hoof -mark on the solid ground. 



The old order almost everywhere has changed and given place 

 to new. But there is a comer left — the district of the Broads of 

 Norfolk — where one may still see with natural eyes what the 

 world in those parts must have looked like in days before the chalk 

 dam which connected England once with the mainland was — 

 happily for Englishmen of these days — broken through, snapped 

 by a sudden earthquake, or slowly mined by countless generations 

 of boring shellfish, until it gave way under the weight of the ac- 

 cumulating waters of the estuary, choked to the north by advanc- 

 ing ice, or tilted westward by some submarine upheaval. There, 

 with a very small stretch of imagination, one may still hear mas- 

 todons crashing through the reed-beds, and British hippopota- 

 muses splashing and blowing in the pools; and, as every now 

 and then an incautious footstep breaks through the raft-like up- 

 per crust of sod, and imprisoned gases bubble up, one may, with- 

 out any stretch of imagination, smell the foul stenches of pliocene 

 days. 



The climate in those days, geologists tell us, judging by the 

 fossil plants of the time, must— before the country was wrapped 

 in ice have been much what it is in Norfolk now. " If the va- 

 rious sections of the upper fresh water beds are examined, we 

 find," writes Mr. Clement Reid, who surveyed the country round 

 Cromer, where the forest-beds are most exposed, " that all appear 

 to have been formed in large shallow lakes like the present broads, 

 or in sluggish streams connected with them." 



Three considerable rivers, the Bure, the Waveney, and the Yare, 

 after meandering through level meadows and marshes, — none of 

 the three, according to Sir John Hawkshaw's estimate, with a fall 

 of more than two inches in the mile, — join and meet the full 

 strength of the tide in Breydon Water. The outflow is checked, 

 and the volume of the streams, finding no other way to dispose of 

 itself, has spread out into side waters and back- waters, wherever 

 the law of levels, the only law to which it owns allegiance, has 

 admitted the right of way. 



The result is a triangle of some fifteen or twenty thousand acres 

 or more in which — as in the abyss through which Satan winged 

 his way in search of the newly created world, 



' ' Where hot, cold, moist, and dry, tour champions fierce. 

 Strove for the mast' ry " — 



land and water hold divided empire. In places the water seems 

 at the first glance to be carrying all before it. Broad sheets (some 

 of them a hundred acres or more) spread almost unbroken sur- 

 faces over imtathomable depths of mud. But the encircling rings 

 of rushes, dwarf alders, and other multitudinous marsh plants, 



