STATE SL TPRESS 10 N OF TUBERCULOSIS UNWARRANTABLE IF NOT THOROUGH. 819 
Such methods are wasteful and uncertain, and are utterly 
inadmissible, when the State can step in and accomplish a work 
that will be of permanent value. 
It is not for a moment intimated that these other partial 
methods will be without benefit. It is freely conceded that they 
will greatly diminish the advanced, aggravated and most dan¬ 
gerous cases of the disease in live stock, and will have an ap¬ 
preciably beneficial influence on the public health. It is merely 
alleged that they are not calculated to eradicate the disease 
from our herds, to accomplish systematic and permanent work, 
such as the veterinary sanitary science of to-day demands as a 
right, because it has, with our light, become a possibility. 
The temporizing methods may be well likened to an attempt 
to clear a field of couch grass (tviticum vepens ), by digging it 
out and thoroughly purifying a square rod here and there at 
different parts of the affected field. At first these laboriously 
cleaned patches would be beautiful and productive, but in a year 
or two they would be again overgrown by the weed and the 
care and labor would have been all in vain. 
We might well take a lesson in these things from the experi¬ 
ence of the past. In the eighteenth century it has been esti¬ 
mated that Europe lost 30,000,000 head of cattle by the rinder¬ 
pest. Towards the middle of the century it invaded Great 
Britain and threatened the virtual extinction of the bovine race. 
As many as 30,000 head were lost in a few months in the one 
county of Cheshire. It was only when the movement of cattle 
was stopped, the infected slaughtered and the places disinfected, 
that the disease was speedily extirpated. Again, in 1865, it was 
introduced, and those of us who, knowing of the past, advised 
the same stringent measures, were derided and abused, until in 
six months, 17,000 a week were being attacked, when, driven to 
desperation, the authorities once more applied the most stringent 
measures, and in a few months more the plague had been 
stamped out. 
The lung plague of cattle imported into England in 1839 
suffered a similar neglect, and prevailed for over fifty years, be- 
