634 
INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 
maladies too frequently assume a fatal character, and the 
medical attendant is often twitted for incompetency, because 
he cannot do impossibilities and save the death-struck 
victims. See the superiority of his position, when by his 
advice a limit is put to the spread of the disease, and lives of 
numbers of animals are thereby saved. Epizootic affections 
of late years have again excited much of the public attention 
from the frequency of their occurrence. It is unnecessary to 
say anything of those known to us as pleuro-pneumonia, 
influenza, eczema, and variola. We have, if I may so ex- 
press it, too familiar an acquaintance with them ; but there is 
another which now threatens to invade our shores, and 
which will, I fear, should it make its appearance here, prove 
destructive beyond measure to our herds of valuable cattle. 
It appears from official reports which have reached our 
government, that this disease has raged in Poland to a fear- 
ful extent, bidding defiance to all preventive means adopted 
by the Russian government to limit its spread. Nor has 
that country been alone affected ; Hungary, the Danubian 
Provinces, Turkey, Southern Russia, and the Crimea, have 
all suffered considerable losses. In a communication made 
last year to the Times , by its Special Correspondent, it is 
said, that in nine months the French lost 8000 bullocks out 
of 17,500, at Samsoun alone; and, that we lost 4000 out of 
10,000, at the same place, from this disease. At this time, 
there are also too many reasons to fear that the malady has 
reached the kingdom of Prussia, having made its appearance 
at Mecklenburg. Mr. T. A. Blackwell, the British Vice- 
Consul at Liibeck, writes, that “ the Liibeck government had 
issued sanatory regulations, to be enforced in case the disease 
should appear in that territory, and as a precautionary mea- 
sure, had enjoined that no horned cattle should be allowed 
to enter it from the Duchies of Mecklenburg-Schwerin and 
Mecklenburg-Strelitz, except such as were certified by com- 
petent anthorities, to be entirely free from the disease;” and 
he adds, “ I am impressed with the conviction that the 
measures adopted to prevent the introduction of this fatal 
disease, or murrain, into a given country, cannot be too 
stringent or too rigorously enforced.” * From the authors 
which Mr. Blackwell has consulted, he learns that the affec- 
tion is called, among other names, in German, “ Rinderpest .” 
He says, that it might appropriately be called the Steppe 
Murrain 3 as “ the original seat of this fatal disease is the 
steppe land of Southern Russia, where it first appeared, or 
at least was first noticed, and scientifically described towards 
the middle of the seventeenth century, since which it has 
