628 Veterinary Medicine. 



produced rinderpest in cattle. It would seem as if here as in the 

 case of lung plague, the experimenters had retained the real but 

 invisible pathogenic agent in what they took for pure cultures. 

 Semmer attributes the disease to fine corpuscles which have so far 

 eluded current methods of staining and cultivation, and that they 

 exist in the number of from one to six in the enlarged cell 

 nucleus. Nicolle and Adel Bey sustain this position, having found 

 that the unseen virulent germ passed through the more open and 

 thinner Berkefeld filter, but failed to traverse the denser Berkefeld 

 and Chamberland porcelain filters even when favored by a some- 

 what higher temperature. As this filtration usually removes the 

 germ and renders the liquid noninfecting they hold that the real 

 germ is almost certainly intraleucocytic. When in exceptional 

 cases a few pass through the filter it is held to be only such as 

 were free in the liquid, and these are usually so small in number, 

 that inoculation with the filtrate does not kill, nor always produce 

 appreciable symptoms, but only immunity. 



Accessory Causes. The essential cause being the germ, acces- 

 sory causes are of neces.sity such as contribute to the preserva- 

 tion of that microbe and its introduction into the systems of sus- 

 ceptible animals. 



Susceptibility has a powerful influence even in races habitually 

 subject to rinderpest. The highest susceptibility inheres in cat- 

 tle, and yet the surviving cattle of the Steppe race, which has 

 been exposed to the infection for centuries, mostly recover from 

 the plague, while fresh cattle imported into the Steppes perish 

 almost without exception. Sheep and goats contract the disease 

 but it is more severe and deadly in the latter than in the former 

 animal. Both, however, can carry the infection back to the bovine 

 animal, as can also the whole group of ruminants. The Guinea pig 

 contracts the affection by inoculation and may thus become an in- 

 direct means of conveying infection from ox to ox. 



iTTimunity follows a first attack. Calves boru of cows that 

 passed through cattle plague during the last months of gestation 

 are usually immune. 



Exposure to infection arises in various ways. All of the secre- 

 tions of the diseased animal are apparently infecting, and the 

 virus possesses great vitality, so that the channels of infection are 

 almost endless. It is carried in the manure, washed on in streams, 



