Alleged Causes. 11 



cattle products, from an infected country have been 

 rigidly excluded. In many cases, indeed, we find these 

 alleged causes operating with the greatest intensity in 

 isolated countries where this malady has never been 

 known. The cow-stables of England were far worse 

 ventilated at the beginning of the nineteenth century 

 than they are to-day; yet. this disease was unknown 

 in Great Britain until Dutch and Dutch-infected Irish 

 cattle were imported in 1842. None feed with a 

 more lavish hand than dairymen, yet the dairy coun- 

 tries of Denmark and Schleswig have only known tliis 

 disease as the result of importation, and have long 

 since freed themselves from the pest. The Channel Isl- 

 ands, which produce the richest milkers in the world, 

 have never known this disease, but only because all land- 

 ing of foreign cattle is criminal. Inclemency, variability 

 and extremes of the Aveather are above all characteristic 

 of the Highlands of Scotland, yet the Highlands, which 

 breed their own stock and suffer a large egress but no 

 ingress of cattle, have never been ravaged by this affec- 

 tion, whereas in the mild and equable Lowlands it has 

 decimated the herds yearly. The immunity of countries 

 with the rigorous climates of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, 

 Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and 

 above all our Western plains, where the cattle are often 

 wintered without shelter, is even more striking in this re- 

 spect. Iced water and corrupt malarious water are all 

 that the cattle can obtain in many of our Western States, 

 but there is no evidence that this disease has ever existed 

 aaywhere in the West, and no danger whatever attaches 

 to our Western cattle until they have entered infected 

 localities in the East. Similar remarks may be made 

 of overwork and hereditary predisposition, as also of epi- 

 tlemic and telluric conditions, which are but cloaks for 

 ignorance, and a persistent adherence to an unfounded 

 idea. 



