772 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 
SCIENTIFIC MISCELLANY. 
A VISIT TO THE AFFLICTED CATTLE REGION OF KANSAS. 
S. B. BELL, M. D, 
[We received this article too late to use the whole, but give the results of 
Dr. Bell's observations, the conclusion being that he found no evidences of the 
existence of the dreaded " foot and mouth disease," but believes that the greater 
part, if not all, of the trouble has arisen from freezing and lack of food and 
water,] — Ed. Review. 
Upon entering the herds the first impression was the general thin, bony, 
gaunt, skeleton, shadowy, dried-up, wrinkled, condition of the cattle. * 
******* After a general survey 
of the situation I spent half a day searching for epizootic aphtha. I thought I 
would pick out a bad case and test it thoroughly by inoculating twenty animals. 
I inoculated four only. I looked in vain for an eye or mouth symptom. Not a 
tear, not a sign of mouth trouble, no swollen tongue, no salivation, not a slob- 
ber, not a sore. No lesion of mouth, lip, tongue, roof, or palate. Some had 
had blistered gums, but the blisters were perfectly healed, with only a mere trace 
of discoloration of the gums. There was not an ulcer, pustule, pock or pimple 
that I could find in the herds. There were no chancres, with deep hardened 
base as represented in the printed cuts. 
Their mouths were abnormally white, owing perhaps to their rigidly enforced 
dietetic regulations. There were abundant lesions of cold horns, trimmed ears 
as if by a pair of scissors. There were hollow tails and dead tails, dropped tails, 
and dropping tails. Their bellies are hollow as that of a hungry wolf — their 
horns as whistles and their bones as clear of marrow as a bird's. They are almost 
bloodless — the organisms that should have gallons of rich blood have only pints 
of impoverished blood. There will be a shower of tails and hoofs on the Neosho 
this spring, and perhaps all through the high prairies of the west. But the great, 
sad, sorrowful lesion is of feet and toes : one hundred and thirty-two cattle of all 
kinds in three herds, Keith's, Hindman's and Trebinow's, affected in the feet and 
legs. Whenever affected at all, the part so affected is entirely dead and dried 
up and separated by sloughing the dead part from the living unless the bones 
and tendons hold them together — which is the case remote from joints. The 
separation is as perfect in all as if a surgeon had commenced an amputation by 
the circular method — cut down clean to the bone and then left his patient with- 
out sawing off the bone. At the ankle joints the amputation is complete with- 
out the aid of surgery. There is little swelling and the stumps and raw surfaces 
