12 The Lung Plague of Cattle. 



The same is true of distillery feeding, of low, damp 

 marshy pastures, of fodder spoiled by wet, or decompo- 

 sition, or covered by cryptogams, of extreme changes of 

 climate, etc., etc. All these are brought into play in 

 many of our Western States ; no climatic change could 

 be more severe than that to which our Texan cattle are 

 subjected in being transferred to Nebraska or Minnesota, 

 yet not all of these conditions combined have ever gene- 

 rated de novo the germ of the Bovine Lung Plague. Had 

 it done so in a single instance on our unfenced cattle 

 ranges we must inevitably have passed through the same 

 experience as Australia and the Cape of Good Hope, each 

 infected by a single sick animal and each speedily rav- 

 aged throughout by this most insidious and unrelenting 

 pestilence. 



The incontrovertible fact that we can point to no coun- 

 try (out of the centre of the eastern continent) in which 

 this disease prevails, into which we cannot also trace its 

 introduction in the system of an infected animal, or some 

 of its products, must put to silence aU claims to its spon- 

 taneous development in those countries. This grand truth, 

 that the disease is only known to-day as the result of 

 contagion, dawned upon some of the best medical minds 

 of the last century. The renowned physiologist, Haller, 

 writing in his native Switzerland, the mountains of which 

 had been maligned as the source and native home of the 

 plague, claimed that, on the contrary, it was utterly un- 

 known save as the result of importation. The last quarter 

 of a century has sustained Haller's representation of a 

 century before ; the dissase has been exterminated and 

 the herds of the Alpine and Jura mountains and valleys 

 freed from the pest. A list of other states which have 

 expelled this disease from their borders deserves to be. 

 mentioned in this connection ; these are Norway, Sweden, 

 Denmark, Sohleswig-Holstein, Oldenburg, and Mecklen- 

 burg-Schwerin in the Old World, and Massachusetts and 



