353 
Foreign Department. 
SUMMARY EXPOSITION OF EXPERIMENTS PERFORMED IN 
HOLLAND, AND BELGIUM, AND THE DEPARTMENTS OF 
THE NORTH, AND PAS-DE-CALAIS. 
BY THE SCIENTIFIC COMMISSIONS, INSTITUTED IN ORDER 
TO ASCERTAIN THE UTILITY OF INOCULATION AS A 
PREVENTIVE MEANS OF PLEUROPNEUMONIA. 
The Official Reports of the Dutch, Belgic, and Lisle 
Commissions, comprise documents of two different orders, 
between which it becomes very necessary to make a distinction 
one from the other, in order that w T e may simplify as much 
as possible the problem we have to resolve. 
Among these documents, some have been obtained under 
the following conditions: 
The experimenters have made choice of cattle in perfect 
health, and free (owing to the country by which they have 
been furnished) from every contagious presumable influence. 
They have inoculated the animals with liquid, extracted 
from the lungs of the subject labouring under peripneu- 
monia. 
Once the inoculation made, and its effects obtained and 
passed off, the inoculated subjects have been submitted to 
the test of contagion, through cohabitation, at the same time 
with animals of the same description uninoculated, to serve 
as subjects of comparison. 
These experiments, in which the elements of the problem 
to resolve, appear as simple as the matter admits of, have, as 
may be seen, a striking analogy with the experiments of the 
French commission (of which the summary has just been 
given in this Report), and, consequently, the results both of 
one and the other may be regarded as measures having the 
same tendency, which may be united together in the same 
group. 
The documents of the second order possess a probative 
value less rigorous : they have been obtained through prac- 
tising inoculations upon herds of beasts which already in 
themselves harboured the germ of the epizootic, or else had 
actually undergone its ravages, so that when the disease came 
to declare itself in inoculated subjects, under parallel con- 
