on Mr. DoggetCs Farm, Holkham, Norfolk. 
55 
and their only movements afterwards were between the marshes 
and the homestead. 
2. Several weeks elapsed between the depasturing and the 
appearance of the malady, while the incubative period of 
anthrax rarely exceeds three days. 
3. There was no disease of this nature in the district. 
The water and hay with which the infected animals were 
furnished were also being given to other stock on the farm. 
So far as the circumstances of the two later outbreaks are 
known to me, there is no evidence whatever to suggest the 
recent importation of infection on to the ground. 
After a careful review of the whole circumstances of this 
inquiry, I must confess my inability to arrive at any definite con- 
clusion as to the mode of origin of the first outbreak of anthrax 
in 1874. Whatever may be the cause of the subsequent out- 
breaks, one thing is fully established, viz. that it must be 
sought for in some conditions peculiar to the four marshes 
specially referred to ; outside which it was not operative in any 
part of the flat at any period. In this connection the circum- 
stance of diseased carcasses being buried in the decoy pastures in 
1874 and 1877 appears to stand out from all the others as best 
capable of explaining the chief facts developed in the inquiry. 
There is the strongest ground for believing that the outbreaks 
of 1877 and 1880 had their origin in fertile anthrax infection 
derived from these carcasses. How that matter was brought to 
the surface cannot be exactly stated. According to the recent 
researches of Pasteur, its exhumation by earthworms may be 
regarded as possible ; of course, in this view of the matter, the 
question must arise— How is it, if the contagium thus exhumed 
was the cause of the outbreaks, that the disease did not manifest 
itself in adjoining pastures, having regard to the fact that the 
earthworms are migratory creatures, and that no obstacle to 
their passage from one field to another exists, and, moreover, 
that here, as elsewhere, no barrier to the dissemination of con- 
taminated worm-casts, either as dust or otherwise, is presented. 
While admitting the possibility of earthworms as a factor in 
the etiology of anthrax, I think that a more consistent explana- 
tion of the facts developed in this inquiry may be found in the 
effluence of soil-water. By this means splenic-fever infection 
(where it exists) seems quite capable of being brought to the 
surface from underlying carnage. Subsequent exposure to heat 
and moisture in the presence of certain organic compounds 
would then seem to be all that is required to induce an active 
state and the necessary conditions of infection. The operations 
of moles and ants, and indeed of other agencies which we cannot 
precisely formulate, may on occasions also assist in this ex- 
