182 
REPORT ON THE CATTLE OF SPAIN. 
duction of the disease in Spain. Up to this time this, lu 
addition to non-importation of cattle, has been in our favour, 
and if vve compare the local condition of the places where, 
according to the opinion of most veterinary writers, the 
rinderpest is spontaneously produced {i.e., in the morasses 
and lagoons of Tartary and some parts of Central Europe), 
with the position and circumstances of our country, we shall 
find them to be in direct opposition to each other. Many 
medical writers have traced cholera-morbus to the fetid and 
poisonous effluvia from the swamps and sunderbunds of the 
Ganges, and thus we veterinary students are constrained to 
accuse the wide marshes of Russia-Poland and Hungary of 
being the birthplace of rinderpest. All the contagious cattle 
diseases known since 1709 have either spread from that focus 
of infection or been sitnilar to the maladies often prevailing 
there. The governments and people of the rest of Europe 
should carefully direct their attention to this fact, and so 
much the more because hitherto it has seemed that the pre¬ 
sent disease is far more easy to prevent and keep oflf than to 
cure. Were the disease to break out in Spain, isolation of 
suspected cattle, and careful separation of healthy, suspected, 
and diseased cattle would be the first means that we should 
adopt; but the cattle of the three different categories ought 
to be kept at a distance from each other, not only separated. 
I am at present doubtful of the success of any means of cure 
if the rinderpest takes strong hold of an animal, that is, during 
the first period of its breaking out. In fact, we should try to 
treat it here as endemic, epidemic, and highly contagious, all 
at once, and at first we should certainly, in any locality, deal 
with it as incurable, and try to stamp it out. If it continued 
and spread we should be guided by circumstances, and by its 
greater or weaker virulence. 
Note on Cattle Rearing in Spain .—Our system of cattle-rear¬ 
ing may be reduced to two fundamental principles :—first, 
the open-air system at all hours and seasons, and, secondly, 
the double system, viz., half the year housed, the other half 
in the open pastures. Constant stabling of cattle is never 
practised, not even in Gallicia, where they stall much more 
than here in Andalusia. The large herds of cows destined for 
breeding are kept (in the south of Spain) on the first system, 
open-air pasturing at all times. These animals never enter 
stables or places of shelter; they live continually in the pasture 
grounds, which are uncultivated meadows and hill-sides, 
covering a vast extent of country. They feed on the herbage 
and plants which are the natural produce of the earth, and 
their food thus depends on the seasons, on the scarcity or 
