S2 
REPOET ON THE CATTLE PLAGUE, STEPPE MURRAIN, 
OR RINDERPEST. 
By James Beart Simonds, Professor of Cattle Pathology 
in the Royal Veterinary College, London. 
Extracted from the North British Agriculturist. 
Epizootic diseases, and particularly those that have pre- 
vailed among cattle and sheep, have in all ages excited much 
attention, and taxed the pen of the faithful historian, as well 
as the cultivator of the science of medicine, to record their 
successive outbreaks and devastating effects. It is not, how- 
ever, our intention in this report to follow in a chronological 
manner the account which has been given of these diseases, 
extending, as it does, from the period of the infliction of “ a 
grievous murrain” of “boils and blains” on the cattle of 
Egypt, as a Divine punishment to the obdurate Pharaoh for 
resisting the command to let the Children of Israel go, down 
to our own times; but to record the result of our investiga- 
' tions into the nature and consequences of the disease which 
recently seemed to threaten to invade our shores. Whether 
“ the murrain ” that fell upon the cattle of the Egyptians 
has been permitted in an altered or mitigated form to remain 
as a scourge to succeeding nations is a problem which cannot, 
we opine, be satisfactorily solved by any supposed resemblance 
which our present cattle plagues may bear to the one de- 
scribed by the sacred historian. This fearful and miraculous 
visitation must be regarded as the chief of these scourges,, 
however destructive they may since have been. 
In the times of the ancient Greeks and Romans the out- 
breaks of these diseases were not unfrequent, and numerous 
records of them are left by Homer, Plutarch, Virgil, and 
others. Columella, at about the commencement of the 
Christian era, speaks of them as contagious maladies ; and 
Vegetius, in the fourth century, treats largely of their con- 
tagious properties, and recommends that the diseased animals 
should, “with all diligence and care, be separated from the 
herd, and put apart by themselves.” Fracastorius and 
Weierus also describe the sad effects of one of these visita- 
tions in 810, when it is said that the greater part of the cattle 
perished throughout the Emperor Charlemagne’s dominions. 
The first recorded instance, however, which we find of the 
cattle in England being affected by one of this class of mala- 
dies is in 1713-14, at which period an epizootic, that for a 
