426 
EDITORIAL. 
Professional Incredulity— It must cause a feeling of 
regret to earnest veterinarians to see the very evident incre¬ 
dulity and want of common dependence and faith between 
veterinarians of different nations or different parts of the same 
country, or even between neighboring veterinarians engaged 
in the same line of work. Every journal seems to bear an 
imprint of some petty jealousy on its pages, and it seems 
almost impossible to carry on a veterinary association without 
its meetings being made an airing-place for some undue ri¬ 
valry. Why is it that we can not, as scientists, accord our 
co-laborers respect, confidence and esteem ? 
In the Veterinary Journal for Oct., p. 260, Dr. Fleming, 
in a well-made editorial, prepares the British veterinary pro¬ 
fession for a condescension which American veterinarians 
have long known they would be ultimately obliged to make, 
and which some few British veterinarians have foreseen, not¬ 
ably Prof. Williams, of Edinburgh. The veterinarians and 
the government of the United States are fully aware of the 
importance of our export trade in cattle, and know full well 
that its value must rest upon the health of the animals offered 
to foreign consumers, so that it would be a suicidal policy for 
us to export animals affected with a serious contagious disease. 
It has always been asserted, and truthfully, so far as we 
can yet learn, that contagious pleuro-pneumonia has at no 
time existed in the cattle-producing area of this country, but 
has been limited to the dairying districts of the Atlantic sea¬ 
board, to a few isolated herds of breeding animals, mostly 
Jerseys, in some of the western States, (and these were derived 
from the eastern dairying districts), and to the well known 
outbreak among distillery cattle and dairy cows in Chicago. 
The disease has not found entrance into the current of the 
beef cattle traffic of this country, and there is good reason for 
believing that it never will. This has been positively asserted 
and reasserted, and yet English veterinarians have openly dis¬ 
believed us, and to prove that we are either incompetent or 
dishonest have persisted in finding contagious pleuro-pneu¬ 
monia (?) among our export cattle landed on their shores, and 
stoutly maintained the correctness of their opinion against our 
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