ANALYSIS OF CONTINENTAL JOURNALS. 
59 
monia, it was necessary to renounce general occision. A 
royal decree of January 6th suspended it to July 1st, in the 
provinces of Holland and Utrecht, except in the localities 
not yet infected, and in a portion of the province of Utrecht, 
and in the islands of South Holland, where sporadic cases 
were only observed. Occision was resumed on July 1st, in 
the province of South Holland, in the region of North Holland 
situated to the south of the Y, and the climes to the west of 
the railway, and in that portion of the province of Utrecht 
comprised between Yssel and Lek, to date from August 25th. 
Lastly, on October 1st slaughter was vigorously carried out 
in a general manner , and its effects were such that during the 
last period, from November 5th to December 2nd, there were 
only 155 cases of pleuro-pneumonia in seventy-two communes, 
or about one case in each commune in fifteen days. 
On the return of the cattle to the pastures for the winter 
the number of cases increased; for while from the 3rd to the 
9th December there were only twenty-nine new cases, in the 
following week there were sixty-five. This was expected. 
“ The facility with which sequestration can be carried out 
during the period when cattle are housed, and the limited 
movement of stock during the winter, gave grounds for 
hoping that a few weeks would suffice, if not to become 
master of the disease, at least to reduce it to such a point that 
it could be easily combated afterwards. If this object could 
have been attained some weeks before the grazing season (to 
which a late spring should have contributed), so as to prevent 
any suspected animal being turned out, the slaughter would 
have ceased, and there would have been nothing more to do 
in the future than to watch that no diseased beasts were in¬ 
troduced from without. The results obtained in this region 
would then have found an echo in others, and the Netherlands 
would have given the example of a rational attempt to over¬ 
come pleuro-pneumonia.” So says the official circular. 
While warmly applauding the efforts made by our neigh¬ 
bours, the Netherlanders, says M. Dele, in the direction of 
extirpating this plague from their territory, and the happy 
effects of which would have been felt in Belgium, we never¬ 
theless cannot avoid making some important observations on 
the subject of this circular. We regret to learn that the 
Netherlands has given an example to other countries in the 
institution of rational measures for the suppression of pleuro¬ 
pneumonia. We do not pretend to claim for Belgium the 
priority in the matter of compulsory slaughter, which has been 
practised consequent on a royal decree of December 1st, 1868, 
in every case of specified contagious disease. We only limit 
