THE PREVAILING EPIDEMIC AMONGST CATTLE, &C. 139 
of cattle falling prostrate before its baneful influence in the short 
space of a fortnight. Its infectious properties extend to all the 
cloven-footed and ruminating tribe, but not to the human subject, 
nor the horse and dog. On one occasion a poor man’s cow came 
to my establishment labouring under the disease, and was very in- 
advertently put into my cowhouse to have its feet properly ex- 
amined and pared out: although my own cow was out in the field 
at the time, and only tied up at night, yet the disease developed 
itself in four or five days by tenderness in her feet, followed by the 
affection of the mouth, and accompanied by the general febrile 
symptoms. 
A very erroneous idea has gone abroad, that the pigs have taken 
the disease from partaking of the milk of the infected cows ; but 
they have simply become affected upon the same principle as sheep, 
by having been allowed to come in contact with them, or to follow 
after them in the pastures or straw-yards where they have been 
turned out. Pigs and calves, as a matter of experiment, have been 
fed with the milk of infected animals, but kept out of the sphere of 
the contagion, and have not been the least affected. My own 
family, including a child twelve months old, partook of the milk 
and cream of my own infected animal (being old, milched, and near 
calving, we gathered no butter) without experiencing any injurious 
effect. The loss, therefore, to the kingdom in butter and cheese, 
by the milk having been unnecessarily sacrificed, has been im- 
mense in amount; it is only where particular cows’ udders are 
labouring under an attack of inflammation, or what is called gar- 
geted, that the milk is required to be flung away. 
Wherever this disease has assumed its epidemic form (as in our 
district) like the cholera, it appears uninfluenced in its freaks by 
either weather, locality, soil, pasture, or previous feeding — affect- 
ing the poor as well as the well-conditioned animal, the old as well 
as the young, without distinction ; but I consider those cows which 
were the best milkers, and in full milking at the time of attack, as 
experiencing it more severely than others. It made its first ap- 
pearance in the northern parts of Staffordshire, near Uttoxeter, at 
a few insolated farms during the spring of last year, in consequence 
of some diseased cattle, purchased at Uttoxeter fair, and introduced 
into their respective herds, to which localities it was confined; nor 
was it till last autumn that it assumed its epidemic form amongst 
us, when it involved in its attacks both sheep and pigs; at the 
same time an epidemic fever, of a virulent and highly infectious 
nature, broke out amongst the horses of the district, seldom sparing 
a single horse in any establishment, however numerous, from its 
attack. The same epidemic amongst horses traversed the kingdom 
in 1825-26, and then passed over into France, where it' swept off 
