272 
The Progress of Legislation against 
Professor Brown added to his report the statement that the 
actual total was probably double that reported. The labour 
attached to obtaining the returns was too great for the limited 
number on the staff at the Privy Council office, and Professor 
Brown reported that they were under the necessity of discon- 
tinuing their inquiries. 
In 1872 cattle plague was again introduced, but quickly 
stamped out. The late Mr. John Algernon Clarke, who contri- 
buted many able papers to The Journal of the Royal Agricultural 
Society, wrote in February, 1869 : — 
Tliat without any larger consumption of sheep and cattle food than at 
present we may so augment our annual home production of meat that the 
increase would exceed our total yearly importation. And to secure this 
grand result all that we require is a reasonable measure of success in saving 
from destruction those wasted portions of our flocks and herds which, after 
being reared and fed upon valuable food, now perish by preventable 
diseases. 
He then quoted : — 
a computation of the Cattle Insurance Company that 900,000 cattle 
died of pleuro in the six years preceding the outbreak of rinderpest, while 
only 552,70-3 cattle were imported during the same period ; 
and gave the actual losses of the Norwich Insurance Company 
as 63| per cent, of cattle in 1858, 45 per cent, in 1859, and 
47 per cent, in 1860. He added : — 
Mr. Robert Kilby deduced from a very extensive inquiry which he 
instituted in all the counties of the kingdom that during the last twenty- 
eight years pleuro-pneumonia destroyed twenty times the number of cattle 
officially returned as losses during the two years of cattle plague. That in 
his belief foot-and-mouth disease has done more than even cattle plague and 
pleuro towards raising the price of butcher’s meat. 
Finding that the obtaining of official returns of the attacks 
of foot-and-mouth disease for 1872 was abandoned, I undertook 
the task for my own county, and sent printed forms into every 
parish and hamlet of Herefordshire, with a circular letter asking 
for the information. The returns thus obtained were not by any 
means complete, which probably arose from the fear that advan- 
tage might be taken of those who had not made the proper returns 
in the first instance. Incomplete, however, as they were, they 
showed that there were 34,212 cattle attacked and 2,047 died ; 
107,789 sheep attacked and 1,876 died; 8,220 pigs attacked 
and 1,523 died. A Committee of the Herefordshire Chamber of 
Agriculture, presided over by Mr. Rankin, now M.P. for the 
Leominster division of Herefordshire, estimated the losses sus- 
tained by that visitation to be 155,226£. 
