Report on Liver-Rot. 
18a 
Cheshire. — Mr. John Roberts, Well House, Chester, has been 
twenty-four years in his present holding, and until the present 
visitation never knew a sheep rotten, excepting when he sent 
some ewes from home in November and discovered them to be 
fluked in the following February. On 700 acres, one-third of 
it old pasture, the remaining arable, flat and some of it liable 
to flood, 210 ewes and about 300 young sheep are kept. Using 
for all the sheep tolerably regularly throughout the year half-a- 
pound each of decorticated cotton-cake and bran, and keeping 
them mostly on the arable land, Mr. Roberts has escaped with 
small loss ; he does not use salt. But throughout the county 
many farmers have lost or had to sacrifice their whole flocks. 
Numerous cases occurred last year and the year before of sound 
Welsh ewes brought upon Cheshire farms in November and 
dying in March. The lambs from these ewes seldom have any- 
thing amiss during their first summer ; they probably pick up the 
parasite late in the autumn, and die in February and March. Ewes 
badly fed and pulled down by bearing or nursing two strong 
lambs first show the disease. On the thin-skinned clay flats 
which hold water, even on some of them when fairly drained, 
the losses have been dreadful ; where there is stiff clay soil and 
subsoil, even the hanging land has caused much fatality ; where 
there is a porous subsoil the mortality has not been so serious ; 
on the gravel soils the flocks and herds are stated to have been 
hitherto sound. But Mr. Roberts and others affirm that the disease 
is greatly more widespread than it was twelve months ago. No 
particular grasses are observed on land liable to rot, nor many 
slugs or snails, which are noticed rather in gleaming weather on 
rich good land which is not subject to rot. Many feeding beasts 
have suffered ; even these have been depreciated to the extent 
of a penny per pound. Many young cattle, chiefly eleven and 
twelve months calves, were dying from rot. One neighbour of 
Mr. Roberts, who cannot keep sheep, has lost twenty calves. 
No cases of flukes have been met with amongst unweaned young 
calves or lambs, or amongst horses. On one of the principal 
estates in Cheshire the keeper during the last few weeks has 
picked up eighty hares with enlarged livers full of flukes. This 
presages a still widening distribution of myriads of ova. 
Anglesey, Carnarvon, and other parts of North Wales, have 
produced a good deal of rot on wet, retentive, and frequently 
flooded soils. Mr. R. B. Smith, Penrhyn, Bangor, ascribes the 
immunity of Lord Penrhyn's and other carefully managed flocks 
to keeping them off wet lands, ditching and draining the wetter 
mountains, providing good hay for winter use, salting the hay 
when ricked, and having rock-salt always within reach of the 
sheep. Adopting these piecautions he has not had a case of 
