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PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION G. 
and in many instances tinged with blood. The nose is more or less 
swollen, and the swelling frequently extends to the whole head. The 
sheep breathe open-mouthed, with the head extended upwards. The 
breathing is accompanied by a crackling noise, which can be heard at 
a distance of many yards. The animal becomes perfectly blind, 
staggers forward and towards the direction of the right shoulder, and 
finally falls down and dies with few struggles. In a flock of 5,000 the 
deaths would average from 200 to 300 in the twenty -four hours. Few 
that are attacked recover, and those that do become almost completely 
denuded of wool. 
Post-morfem appearances are a highly inflamed condition of the 
membrane of the nose, which is greatly thickened with a tough 
matter effused over it. The brain, where examined, has not been 
affected beyond an inflamed appearance of the sinuous passages of the 
skull. Jn some cases the pulmonary organs — the larynx, the trachea 
with its various ramifications — have been inflamed ; but in no instance 
in my experience have the air-tubes been obstructed by mucus, and 
in this my experience differs from some descriptions that I have read. 
In all the Queensland outbreaks the uniform report of the inspectors 
and those engaged in examining and burning the carcasses has been 
that there is no mechanical obstruction in the air-passages. The 
stomachs are healthy, but in almost every instance the fieccs have 
been in bard lumps, causing, in many instances, injury to the mucous 
membrane of the intestinal canal. The disease has appeared only 
during seasons when the grass had been withered and sapless by 
either w r inter frosts or summer droughts, and, in one instance, the 
exciting cause was overdosing the sheep with dry salt for the purpose 
of expelling worms. The only successful means of checking its 
virulency has been by placing the sheep on a fresh spring of grass 
or pasture that had recently been burnt. 
The disease when once set up is highly contagious, and was only 
finally stamped out by the slaughter of all infected flocks, and by 
placing the land over which they had pastured or been travelled in 
quarantine for a more or less lengthened period. 
From the description here given it will be apparent that the 
disease is but a very aggravated form of catarrhal fever, common to 
sheep in more rigorous climates ; but I cannot learn that it has 
appeared, during the summer months, in any other country. The 
malignancy of its type in Australia can, in my opinion, only be 
attribuiable to the vicissitudes of our climate, occasioning periodical 
droughts, rendering the herbage innutritions and indigestible. 
With pleuro-pneumonia, on the contrary, our climate exercises a 
benign influence. On its first introduction to Australia it was of a 
much more virulent type than we now know it. The losses from it 
in Queensland during the first outbreak, from the time it entered by 
our southern border in 1864 until it gradually extended to our northern 
shores, were little short of ruinous. Fully 15 per cent, of the cattle 
then in the colony were carried off by it, and in many instances the 
mortality in travelling cattle reached 50 per cent. 
At the present time the actual deaths from the disease, when the 
cattle are left undisturbed on their runs, rarely exceed from 1 to 2 per 
cent., and this in face of the fact that an examination of the lungs and 
pleurae in our slaughter-yards show's that a very much larger percentage 
