MORTALITY AMONG CATTLE AT THE CAPE. 731 
number in the colony. This loss has necessarily diminished 
the resources which are usually available to the agricul- 
turalists for the purposes of trade; and in a colony where 
cattle and horses are so much in demand, not only for the 
means of transport, but for all the agricultural operations 
which in this country and in America are so largely per- 
formed by machinery, the loss is the more severely felt. 
“The Dutch farmers, whose cattle have been stolen con- 
tinually by the Kaffirs, have recently retaliated upon these 
marauders, and made an incursion some 500 strong into the 
districts of the thieving tribes, and returned with a booty of 
several thousand head of cattle recovered. 
“The horse-disease is very prevalent through most of the 
districts of the Cape colony. In its development, progress, 
and successive symptoms, it corresponds generally with the 
epidemic of last year. It is curiously enough commonly 
attributed by the Cape farmers to a peculiar miasma in the 
atmosphere, which, being inhaled, occasions no injury, and 
possesses no poisonous or deleterious property ; but being 
imbibed in the morning or evening by grass, young leaves, 
or so-called dog’s grass, especially along the banks of the 
rivers and in swampy parts, becomes the cause of a peculiar 
product, in consequence of which only a few mouthfuls, 
taken up by the horse as food, have the same effect as the 
most rank vegetable poisons, and for which hitherto no 
active antidote has been discovered. The stabling of horses, 
and preventing them, on being watered, from taking the 
least vegetable food, appears thus far to have been the only 
preventive. 
“ It is much to be regretted that the Cape farmers, or at 
least the local journalists, do not make themselves more 
conversant with the particulars of the disease as prevalent in 
Europe among cattle and horses, and the means resorted to 
to lessen the mortality. Much benefit would be gained by a 
more extensive diffusion of the veterinary, chemical, and 
agricultural knowledge which has been acquired in Britain 
and Europe, and in all our colonies. 
“ Our columns have from year to year been filled with 
numerous valuable papers and details respecting pleuro- 
pneumonia, and the republication of some of these in the 
colonial journals might afford much valuable information as 
to the premonitory symptoms, and the general practice in 
Europe, when the disease prevails.” 
