946 sanitary police And the Battle plague. 
such regulations as circumstances require to be immediately 
applied and rigorously maintained. With a sanitary service 
as well organized, the struggle against the epizootic would be 
easy, and success would be certain. From time to time, in 
fact, it has made incursions into the Prussian provinces 
adjacent to the Russian empire, but the ignited foci have 
been extinguished as soon as they have been kindled, and an 
impassable barrier has immediately been opposed to the pro¬ 
gress of the contagion. 
In France, to obtain the same results as in Germany, it 
would be necessary to have a sanitary service organized in the 
same manner, because we ask the municipal authorities to do 
more than is possible for them in the midst of their place of 
habitation, with the conditions of their origin, and with the 
prejudices of their constituency. We must, in fact, avow 
that we do not always know how to bend to the law, and to 
accommodate ourselves to its yoke. We have also a much 
greater tendency to avoid them, when those who are charged 
to impose them live with us on those intimate terms which 
weaken authority. Under such conditions, the pow T ers of a 
sanitary police, which are given to the Maires by the French 
law, are, it should be remembered, too frequently at least, not 
placed in hands sufficiently energetic. Here is, therefore, 
one of the principal causes of the difficulty of application of 
sanitary measures, as they cannot produce their proper effect, 
except when they are everywhere carried out in their entirety. 
One single omission for a single moment, and contagion will 
find a road open before it; thus it is spread, and thus is lost 
all the advantage which has been obtained by the efforts to 
restrain and extinguish it. For instance, when it is for¬ 
gotten to disinfect a railway-waggon which has conveyed 
diseased animals, this waggon—a receptacle for the germs of 
contagion—-transmits them to all the ruminants with which 
it is loaded the next time; and by their intermediary it will 
disseminate them in passage, even to a long distance. 
Numerous reports, transmitted to the central administration, 
carry evidence that, in too many cases, railway waggons 
which have not been disinfected have served as vehicles for 
the cattle-plague, and have been the most active instruments 
of its dissemination. 
In Germany all is quite different. The trucks which have 
been used for the carriage of beasts are submitted to a dis¬ 
infection before being employed again for the same purpose. 
Water falls from a raised reservoir, and by its downfall and 
the force of its flow it detaches and carries away the organic 
materials adhering to the sides. Besides this it annuls, by 
