362 
PLEURO-PNEUMONIA IN AUSTRALIA. 
ill New South Wales by the Brothers Thomas and Robert M‘Laurin, on 
their Yarra Yarra station, in the early part of August, 1861. These 
gentlemen did not seek to cloak the fact; but, on the other hand, 
ordered their stockmen to pick out every ailing beast, and had it de¬ 
stroyed and burned, until they had in all destroyed nearly 200 head of 
cattle. During this time they invited the squatters round to come and 
see the disease in the living and dead subjects. As they were tailing 
the mob in which the disease was first observed, the best of opportunities 
were offered for inspection. The herd was made up of cattle bred on 
the Yarra Yarra run, on Curnulla and Moroco, Lower Murray, and on 
the Mitta Mitta, Victoria, the last draft of which came over in the 
month of February, 1861. 
As it became generally kmvn that pleuro-pneumonia epizootica had 
broken out at Yarra Yarra, the settlers began to speculate regarding its 
introduction—one class asserting that it must have come from Mitta 
Mitta with the last draft of cattle; and another, that the severe system 
of tailing practised during the wet season must have been the means of 
producing the disease ; while the brothers M'Laurin say that they believe 
that it must have been introduced among their cattle by a strange working 
bullock which was found among the first that they destroyed with one 
lung enclosed in a membranous sack, constituting the chronic stage of 
pleuro-pneumonia epizootica. Evidently this bullock had been at some 
distant period very bad, and no doubt while thus suffering was turned 
adrift upon the run. Another fact also adds weight to this supposition : 
it is this—that 300 head of the same cattle as those last brought from 
Mitta Mitta were left on that run, and are still free of the disease. 
Again, if it had been produced by the severe system of tailing there 
adopted, we have pleuro-pneumonia epizootica produced spontaneously 
on Yarra Yarra, a fact never before demonstrated, and which, coming 
as it now does merely as a supposition, must be received with scepticism. 
Having made all the inquiry possible, J am bound to state that it is 
my opinion—judging from the combined history—that the strange 
working bullock above alluded to introduced the disease, probably before 
the Mitta Mitta cattle came to Yarra Yarra in February; and that, 
although the tailing cattle might not have been the first infected, they 
were tLie first to show symptoms of disease from the manner in which 
they were kept, and from being immediately under the eye of the person 
in charge of them. 
The next two herds that were noticed were Mrs. Greene’s, Billy Bong, 
and Mr. Bowler’s, Ten Mile Creek. These two stations bound Yarra 
Yarra on the north and west. Mrs. Greene’s cattle had been on her 
run for a lengthened period, while some of Mr. Bowler’s had come 
from a station on the Mitta Mitta, and some from Mr. White’s run of 
Merrvbundinyah, in the Lachlan district. Mr. Bowler’s cattle were 
brought from Mitta Mitta one month later than the Messrs. M‘Laurin’s; 
and certainly, though a public road passes through Mr. Bowler’s Mitta 
Mitta station, and though from the Victorian commissioners’ report I 
find that diseased bullocks are said to have passed that way, yet 1 do 
not think Bowler’s cattle brought it, otherwise those he left would also 
have given evidence of the same disease. The store cattle he brought 
from White’s do not seem to have been first attacked. 
But the disease seems so virulent in some quarters so far distant from 
either of these runs above mentioned that we must now look lor its 
introduction, not to one point, but to many. For instance, we have 
Messrs.Talbot and Smith’s run of Urana Creek, and Messrs. M‘Caughey 
and Co.’s (late Woodhouse’s) station of Coonong, both in the saltbush 
