1852 
THE CULTIVATOR. 
51 
Singular Disease in Cattle. 
Editors Cultivator —Having met with a disease in 
calves and young cattle, which I have not heard spoken 
of, or seen described in any farming work, I have con¬ 
cluded to send you a description of it, in hopes some 
of your subscribers may give us some further infor¬ 
mation on its cause, cure, or a prevention. About 
a year from last August, three of my Ayrshires calves, 
some four or five months old, that had been weaned 
from the cows and were kept in a pasture lot adjoining 
the farm-house and fed on milk twice a day, were at¬ 
tacked, apparently, with cold, accompanied by a bad 
cough. I physicked them with sulphur, shifted them in a 
lot of fine young grass, with a shed for them to go un¬ 
der during the heat of the day or when it rained, gave 
them fresh milk or water to drink as they choose; but 
all to no effect, as they continued to cough as much as 
ever, and two of them became very thin; the other ap¬ 
peared to have a good appetite and kept fat. One of 
the lean ones died. I had it opened, and in its bronchus 
or windpipe, I found nearly half a pint of thin whiteworms, 
somewhat similar to the gap-worms in fowls, having five 
instead of two trunks, much longer bodies, about the 
thickness of a gap-worm, but white instead of being red 
as the gap-worm is. From the position in which I found 
them, they appeared to have collected together in a 
mass or bunch, and to have strangled the animal. They 
were perfectly alive when I examined the calf some 
hours after its death, and continued to move about while 
I was examining them under the miscroscope. With 
one of the remaining calves I attempted to remove or 
loosen the worms, as you do the gap-worms in poultry, 
but neither I nor my assistant succeeded in getting the 
tongue far enough out to see the aperture of the wind¬ 
pipe, so we gave it up; but a butcher afterwards told 
me there would have been no difficulty in doing it, if we 
had pulled the tongue out on one side of the mouth, 
and then the bronchus or windpipe might have been 
cleaned out with a large feather. The two other calves 
died about a week after the first, on the same night, 
and upon examining them, I found about the same quan- 
ty of similar worms in the bronchus of the lean one. 
The fat one had very few worms in its bronchus, but up¬ 
on examining its lungs I found quite a number through¬ 
out the air vessels of the lungs. 
I have before this lost cattle, I have no doubt, with 
the same disease, from the cough and other symtoms 
being precisely similar, but considering it in them an in¬ 
flammation of the lungs, I never thought of examining 
their bronchus or windpipes, but being in the habit of 
operating on poultry for the gaps, I thought this might 
be somewhat of a similar disease, and was thereby led 
to the examination. 
The only manner in which I could account for the dis¬ 
ease in these calves, was from their having inhaled some 
minute insects which had been bred in the milk, which 
was left standing in the sun, and that the eggs of these 
animals had turned into these worms, as I had frequent¬ 
ly observed myriads of almost imperceptible flies hover¬ 
ing over the tub in which the milk was poured for the 
calves. So this summer I raised four calves in the same 
lot, but took the precaution to have them fed from pails 
which were removed and'washed out as soon as the calves 
had fed, and they had nothing of the gap or bronchial 
disease. 
In page 305 of the 1st. vol. of your new series of the 
Cultivator, you published an article on the subject of 
gapes in chickens, &.C.. since which time I have practic¬ 
ed the mode there described, on chickens, turkeys, and 
goslings, with perfect success, and am of opinion, that if 
you make use of a feather of an appropriate size, to the 
bird to be operated on. and go leisurely and carefully to 
work, you will never fail to cure the fowl. With some 
of my goslings they were so large that I had to splice two 
quills together, making them over a foot long, to enable 
me to reach the bottom af the windpipe, and I then re¬ 
moved twelve large gap-worms from each of them. My 
ducks have never had the gapes; whether ducks are ob- 
noxions to that disease, I cannot say. 
Herewith I send you a drawing of the bronchial worm 
taken from the calf’s windpipe, as it appears when mag¬ 
nified ; three of the trunks or tubes are filled with eggs, 
similar to the female gap-worm. I remain yours, &c 
Charles F. Morton. Murtonville, Orange Co., N. Y., 
Nov. 26,1851. 
Agricultural Economy. 
Do our agriculturists study economy as attentively as 
they ought to do? I do not mean economy in the ordi¬ 
nary sense—in expenditures, saving every cent they can. 
and stinting supplies. I mean the economy of manage¬ 
ment. True economy adapts means to ends, applying no 
more or less of the one than is necessary for the comple¬ 
tion of the other. For example, ten acres of land well 
prepared and thoroughly tilled, will produce five hun¬ 
dred bushels of corn. The economical farmer, there¬ 
fore, who intends to produce that amount of corn, will 
not use twenty acres of poorly prepared, and badly till¬ 
ed land, to accomplish it; because the same amount of 
crop will require more labor on twenty acres, in plowing 
and tilling, however imperfectly performed, than it will 
on ten acres, however well it shall be tilled and prepar¬ 
ed. Again, if a farmer have an hundred loads of ma¬ 
nure only, if he study economy, lie will rather apply it 
all to a small piece of land, and thus manure it well, 
than to a large piece, and thus manure it very imperfectly; 
because, in the former case, it will require less labor to 
produce a given amount of crop, than in the latter. 
Again, a farmer that has a given amount of manure, will 
apply it in sufficient quantity to as muchjand only as it 
will supply with sufficient fertilization, and thus, by an¬ 
nually improving a small piece, at length render the 
whole fertile. So, also, the owner of a large tract of 
land will attempt to cultivate only just so much of it as 
