Contagion the One Known Cause. 23 



was imported into Brooklyn, the malady was unknown 

 Since that date it has never at any time been absent from 

 Brooklyn and Long Island. 



" On the contrary, Massachusetts, which imported this 

 animal plague in 1859, set herself vigorously to the work 

 of exterminating it. In the next five years she killed and 

 paid for over 1,000 cattle, but in so doing she killed the 

 contagion, and since 1865 has not known this disease. 

 Cattle have lived in innumerable herds in the Western 

 States, subjected to all possible privations and to the 

 greatest trials in the way of travel, crowding, filth and 

 starvation, but on no occasion has this lung plague been 

 developed, and to-day I believe the cattle of those States 

 are as sound as are the buffalos of the plains. In Europe 

 this plague always extends on the occasion of any great 

 war, and devastates the countries through which the 

 armies pass, but only because the commissariat parks are 

 supplied from infected districts. During the late Ameri- 

 can war our commissariat herds were subjected to as 

 great privations, with the additional drawback of the 

 absence of the smooth-paved roads of the Old World, 

 but the plague never broke out in those herds nor rav- 

 aged the States where the armies were operating. The 

 explanation is that the cattle supplies were drawn from 

 uninfected regions, and in the absence of the specific 

 imported disease-germ no abuse was capable of produc- 

 ing it in America. The swill-milk stables of the West 

 are as much crowded, as filthy and as ill-ventilated as 

 those of New York and New Jersey. But the swill- 

 stables of the West never produce this disease, while 

 those of the seaboard into which the germ has been in- 

 troduced are ravaged to a ruinous extent. If more proof 

 is wanted of the purely contagious nature of the malady, 

 it is to be found in the entire absence of the plague from 

 the Highlands of Scotland, the Channel Islands, Brit- 

 tany, much of Normandy, Spain, Portugal, Norway and 

 Sweden. These places breed their own stock and rarely 

 or never import strange cattle, therefore this poison ex- 

 otic to their soil has never gained a foothold. Norway 

 and Sweden have, indeed, imported the plague, but 

 speedily expelled it by the only effectual method of ex- 

 terminating the poison. The same is true of a numbei 



