306 SCOTTISH METROPOLITAN VETERINARY MEDICAL SOCIETY. 
tion and blindness to the conditions which are necessary to its 
successful practice. 
The measure.of success with which, however, inoculation had 
in some instances been attended, was happily quite sufficient to 
keep it from dying out. Slumbering on the Continent, tabooed in 
this country, it yet managed to gain a footing in Cape Colony, 
where to the best of my belief, it is still practised. From the Cape 
it found its way to Australia, and was first successfully tried 
there in 1862, the very year, strange to say, in which it had been 
so unhesitatingly condemned by G-amgee here. 
Introduced by a cow landed in Melbourne from England in 
1858, pleuro-pneumonia had gradually, but none the less surely, 
spread from Victoria to the neighbouring colonies of South 
Australia and New SouthWales, and from thence into Queensland. 
All attempts to stamp out the disease by quarantine and whole¬ 
sale massacre proved useless, and as the rapid march of the 
scourge bid fair to deprive the country of one of its principal 
sources of wealth and economy, stockowners began to consider 
if there was no other method of combating it. 
It was then that inoculation was tried, by first one and then 
another, and so on; and although it must have been under very 
adverse circumstances, the results were largely satisfactory, so 
much so, that for a time the operation became a very general 
one, as it is at the present time. 
It must not, however, be supposed that its introduction there 
was unopposed, or that its growth had been a regular one. On 
the contrary, to my knowledge, it has met with very severe 
handling, hostile criticism, and, in some isolated instances, I 
believe, condemnation. At first its success in the hands of a 
careful few was all that could be desired; but as its more general 
adoption grew with men’s fears of the disease, and its rapid 
spread throughout an extensive country, those best acquainted 
with the mode of operating and the necessary precautions to be 
observed were unfortunately too few to be of much avail in pre¬ 
venting the operation from getting into the hands of adventurous 
anybodies, whose sole aim was the filling of their pockets for the 
time, not the successful application of that which they pretended 
to practise. 
You may imagine the results. The deaths from casualty and 
malpractice were quite as many as from the disease. Frequently 
the cattle were not inoculated at all; so that, between malinocu- 
lation and the disease, they were often worse than they would 
have been if left alone. This was notably the case in Victoria 
and Queensland, but not so much so, I believe, in New South 
Wales, where the most intelligent personal efforts of Chief 
Cattle Inspector Mr. Bruce to instruct had, as they continue to 
have, the best possible results. 
IJp to 1868, I cannot say that I had given the subject of in¬ 
oculation any consideration. As a student I knew its literature 
and of Mr. G-amgee’s attempt to introduce it into Edinburgh 
