THE EXTERMINATION OF THE CATTLE TICK. 
395 
Permit me to repeat, ticks are the only known means of 
spreading the disease ; if so, is it not self-evident that to pre¬ 
vent the disease spreading the distribution of the tick must be 
further restricted and finally the species be exterminated ? 
In the report of the United States Department of Agricul¬ 
ture on Texas fever, 1893, the question as to there being another 
mode of infection in those States where the disease is more or 
less permanently located, is left an open one. Nor can it be 
settled until some area is found in which the cattle are free 
from ticks, and in which cattle brought there die of the disease 
without having been infected by ticks. When such a place is 
found the study of the disease may be taken up just where it 
has stopped, and new causes or methods of transmission found. 
This leads us to the question of climatic, telluric or other condi¬ 
tions which may be supposed to foster and spread the disease, 
aside from the parasite, which we know distributes it far and 
wide. 
The prevalence of the disease in the Southern States in 
spring, summer and autumn among cattle which are merely 
moved from farm to farm, or at the outside not over a few miles, 
is a strong argument that neither climate nor soil has aught to 
do with the spread of disease, for they are the same. Mr. A. W. 
Bitting, in Bulletin No. 28 of the Florida Agricultural Station, 
1894, describes an outbreak in a herd of cows, bred by the 
owner near Tallahassee, and kept sound until moved to a tick 
infested farm nearby, where the “ land and water were about the 
same,” and all became affected. 
In Georgia there are enormous annual losses from red-water 
among cattle, which are merely moved about in neighborhoods 
and farms recognized as infected, although their soil and 
water privileges are identical with neighboring places where no 
cattle are lost or whose cattle die when moved. 
In your own State there are adjoining counties in which 
murrain is known or not known ; farms which have never lost 
cattle, while other cattle brought to them or taken from them, 
frequently die. Nor is it necessary to move them from a high- 
