560 
D. E. SALMON* 
are equally unworthy of him and of the committee for which 
he spoke. They might be taken up one by one and shown 
to be just as uncalled for, just as far from the truth as those 
which have been considered. I will not weary your readers, 
however, by going further into this subject, since his whole 
case hangs upon the assumption that I failed to give Dr. 
Smith credit for his work in the investigations of swine dis¬ 
eases. This assumption of Dr. Peters is conclusively dis¬ 
proved by the quotations which I have made from my reports, 
and shown to be without reason or justification; and that be¬ 
ing the case, the inferences and insinuations which he bases 
upon it must necessarily be taken as equally unworthy of 
belief. 
Having disposed of the first line of attack, the personali¬ 
ties, let us briefly consider the second line, that is, the mis¬ 
representations of our views on scientific questions, made for 
the purpose of introducing plausible arguments for strength¬ 
ening the weak parts of his paper. It is simply the well- 
known dodge of polemical writers, generally referred to as 
setting up straw men for the moral effect which follows from 
knocking them over. 
Dr. Peters quotes from the report of the Bureau for 1886, 
the passage which explains that we had differentiated two 
diseases of swine that had previously been regarded as one, 
and that it was consequently necessary, to prevent confusion 
in the future, to apply a distinctive name to each, and that, 
after full consideration, it had been concluded best to call the 
disease described in the report of 1885 “ hog cholera, and 
that described in the report of 1886 “ swine plague,” and that 
this was the most desirable since the latter disease existed in 
Germany, where it was also called swine plague (schweine- 
seuche). These reasons certainly appear to me to be sufficient 
for our course, and the man who sees a hidden intent on our 
part to cause confusion instead of preventing it, must have 
an extremely suspicious nature. And yet the doctor serious¬ 
ly states that the following questions propound themselves to 
him after reading our explanation. 
“ After speaking of the disease as swine plague for several 
