264 
EDITORIAL. 
If this seems exaggerated, let us look only to the sanitary 
bulletins of some countries and judge. The records of several 
months back in England for foot-and-mouth disease is “ none.” 
The records for the month of December, 1911, in France were: 
5,954 barns infected in 2,110 communes belonging to 85 depart¬ 
ments. France is divided into 86 departments. 
In the presence of such a state of affairs, with the almost 
impossibiity of preventing the disease from entering* a country 
from the next one through the frontier, with the difficult applica¬ 
tion or the imperfection of sanitary measures, it is easy to ap¬ 
preciate why all imaginable curative treatments may become the 
order of the day. 
The methods of treating animals with foot-and-mouth disease 
are numerous, and while some certain results may be obtained, 
and be good in some individuals, or be useless in others, after 
all, everyone fails in the important necessary object—the arrest 
and extinction of the disease. It would seem as if by law the 
treating of such animals ought not to be permitted, or at least 
ought to be so regulated that no danger, no spreading of the 
disease, could be possible. If such could be, the big charlatanistic 
advertising that we have been witnessing here of late or such 
booming means as the inhalation of iodoformed ether would not 
be allowed under the false pretext of saving the animal’s life or 
arresting the contagion. 
* 
* * 
The scientific journals on the Continent have been of late 
filled, more or less, with the present epizooty, but while many are 
either satisfied in recording the condition and the number of 
animals infected, or, again, publishing the new wonders proposed 
for treatment, others treat of facts which have greater impor¬ 
tance and valuable interest, as they intend to throw light on that 
disease and possibly will give the key to the road which will 
make it better known, and may bring our bacteriologists to the 
discovery of proper means to give immunity. 
In the German literature I read first an article from Prof. 
