12 BULLETIN 106, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 
at the beginning of his experiments? There is every reason to 
believe that a calf in passing through the infected birth canal of 
its dam may become infected at the time of birthj or if not then it 
surely often becomes infected within a few days when kept in the 
same stall or stable or fed and handled by persons who come in 
contact with the diseased mother. If a new-born calf be removed 
from its dam at once and kept in strict isolation, I find that it will 
possibly escape infection for a time, but not probably, and that it 
will be several weeks before the macroscopic lesions appear. 
Further and more serious doubt is thrown upon the recorded 
experiments of Ostertag in the symptoms and course of the experi- 
mental granular venereal disease from the fact that the recorded 
symptoms are in conflict with the present writer's clinical experience 
with the beginnings of the disease. This has been gained by observing 
hundreds of heifer calves from 2 to 6 months old affected with 
the disease, as well as a number of experimental calves under im- 
mediate observation, which must necessarily have evidenced the 
disease over and over again in its incipiency. 
Ostertag says : 
The first symptoms of infectious catarrh are swelling of the vulva, redness, swelling 
and sensitiveness of the vaginal mucosa, and a muco-purulent deposit upon the 
vaginal mucosa. 
In the earlier stages of the malady, as we have observed it, there 
are present none of the symptoms emphasized by Ostertag. On the 
contrary, the disease comes on insidiously, and the first sign of 
the malady is the appearance of a few nodules in the vulvar mucosa, 
sharply denned above the surrounding epithelium, as pale yellow 
or colorless transparent elevations having a vascular girdle about 
their bases. Some would call these heifer calves sound, but if 
two or three typical nodules do not indicate granular venereal 
disease it would be difficult to understand by what line of reasoning 
200 or 300 nodules can assure us of the existence of the malady. 
In other words, Ostertag describes, not the beginning of the disease, 
but an " explosion " of the existing malady under profound irritation. 
It is not strange that virulent streptococci induced the symptoms 
he describes, nor that he was able to recover pure cultures of the micro- 
organism from his experimental animals, but he has failed to repro- 
duce the insidious, exceedingly mild early stages of the disease, which 
anyone who cares to do so may watch in heifer calves in any dairy. 
Neither need anyone fail to find cases, especially in recently bred 
heifers or young cows, in which all the symptoms described by 
Ostertag are present in their most impressive form, but that is not 
the beginning or end of the malady; it is its zenith. In a muco- 
purulent vaginal discharge streptococci are usually present, and, 
if sufficiently virulent cultures are introduced into the vagina of an 
