616 TRANSMISSIBILITY OF TUBERCULOSIS BY MILK. 
throughout the colonies, as well as in other countries, but 
like vaccination it has its opponents. It is a means of pre¬ 
vention within the reach of holders of both large and small 
herds, and the operation is simple. To defer action now for 
the purpose of experiments already tried —the very difficulty 
of starting, which on a sound basis with cattle that could 
positively proved to be healthy—is almost an impossibility, 
and is delaying practical work to attempt to show what has 
already been carried out for some years, viz. inoculation as 
a preventive of disease. Professor Law, so late as 1879, says 
of pleuro-pneumonia :—‘ This is the most insidious of all our 
animal plagues—the one which now most urgently presses 
for active interference, and which if neglected will bring a 
terrible retribution in the future. 5 I have reported perhaps 
rather more fully than you may consider absolutely necessary, 
but in doing so I wished to show the course recommended 
by the committee—although no doubt given with every in¬ 
tention of dealing with a most important matter—fails as 
being actually of no practical value, and if followed would 
put the Government to needless expense, and defer the prompt 
and decided action necessary to arrest the spread of pleuro¬ 
pneumonia. I venture to hope that no such action as re¬ 
commended will be taken.—I have &c., C. J. Valentine, 
Chief Inspector of Sheep . 55 —South Australia Advertiser . 
THE TRANSMISSIBILITY OF TUBERCULOSIS BY MILK. 
M. Puech, having recognised the existence of phthisis in 
a cow which was sold for killing, and yet continued to yield 
three or four litres of milk daily, fed with the milk two 
sucking-pigs and two rabbits. He has communicated the 
following results to the Academie des Sciences. The animals, 
when killed, showed tuberculous lesions in strict proportion 
to the length of time the milk had been administered. These 
facts, according to M. Puech, showed that phthisis is trans¬ 
missible by milk direct from the cow. It remains to be 
determined whether this liquid loses its contagious properties 
when it is boiled. M. Bouley afterwards submitted to the 
Academy a jar containing fragments of the lung, liver, spleen, 
the phrenic centre of the diaghragm, and the bronchial and 
submaxillary glands of a pig, five months old, killed sixty- 
seven days after an inoculation of two cubic centimetres of 
meat juice, pressed with an hydraulic press out of a fragment 
of the ischio-tibial muscles of the tuberculous cow mentioned 
in M. Puech’s note. This experiment was made at Toulouse 
