738 
SMALLPOX AMONG SHEEP IN WILTSHIRE. 
wet or damp, and generally unhealthy location, by tender age, 
and by pregnancy. The animal being fatted, or in poor con¬ 
dition, or of a foreign breed, also exercises an unfavorable 
influence over the result. 
It is most important to note, also, the usual mode of out¬ 
break and progression of epizootic smallpox among a flock of 
sheep. The disease does not attack one or two members of a 
flock, and from these spread gradually through the whole 
flock, neither does it attack a whole flock at once. It shows 
itself, like most epidemic diseases in man, in two, or three, 
or more successive attacks, each involving a previously un¬ 
affected and greater portion of the flock, and each extending 
over from twenty-five to thirty days, until the entire flock has 
been affected. Hence it follows that the duration of an out¬ 
break of smallpox in a large flock commonly extends over 
three or four months. 
These facts being premised, let us briefly consider the mea¬ 
sures to be adopted for preventing the spread or mitigating 
the ravages and losses arising from the disease. 
Some of these require no comment. The prohibition of 
the vending, or exposing for sale, of sheep in a diseased state, 
is an initial step, as we have already remarked, admitting of 
no question. The same may be said of the destruction and 
careful burial of sheep hopelessly sick. These and all other 
measures imply the most thorough daily inspection of a flock 
practicable. There remains segregation of affected individuals, 
and isolation of infected flocks, and inoculation. 
The circumstances under which separation alone, whether 
of individual sheep or of infected flocks, or of both, are likely 
to prove available, may, perhaps, be best gathered from the 
following extract from one of several articles by Professor 
Delafond, translations of which were published in the twenty- 
first volume of the Veterinarian. The articles are devoted to 
an examination of the question of inoculation of flocks of 
sheep for smallpox, as a measure of sanitary police. The 
opinions expressed by the learned professor, and the reason¬ 
ings upon which they are based, deserve the highest con¬ 
sideration, and we would commend them to the attention of 
our readers for their scientific interest, in addition to their 
great practical importance at the present moment. 
“ So long,” he says, “as the pox is confined to one flock, or in case even 
it should prevail among several flocks in the same commune or locality, 
isolation, whether it be in the pens or in the fields, is generally the only 
measure that can prevent the spreading of the malady. Bat when an 
epizootic and fatal pox is spread over a large surface of country, during a 
warm and dry season, and at a time that flocks are out grazing, and espe¬ 
cially where natural obstacles, such as woods, hills, mountains, marshes, and 
broad streams of water, become no boundaries to the infected localities, 
