620 OBSERVATIONS ON THE LUNG PLAGUE OF CATTLE. 
shown to exist on the Western Continent except at points to 
which we can clearly trace the germs from the bodies of infected 
animals imported from Europe; if we can show that wherever 
such imported germs have been carefully destroyed the plague 
has been definitely and finally exterminated; and if we can 
show that the testimony to this effect is not confined to America, 
but that the long experience of Western Europe, and the more 
recent history of the disease in the Southern Hemisphere, show 
with equal clearness that this affection never appears in a new 
country save as the result of imported affection, it follows that 
national measures for its extinction are fully warranted, and, 
indeed, imperatively demanded. In this case* the outlay of to¬ 
day is but a trifle as compared with the vast sums that the 
present suppression of the disease will so certainly save to the 
country in all future time. 
This subject is placed first as furnishing the raison d’etre of 
the law, which has been to some extent put in force during the 
past year, and as being a matter which is apparently no better 
understood by the general public to day than it was a year ago. 
Those great public educators, the daily newspapers, still speak 
of the plague as inseparable from feeding on distillery swill, and 
in place of recognising the fact that the infection is restricted to 
very limited area on the Atlantic seaboard, they affirm that “ it 
has been found wherever it has been sought for.” (See New 
York Herald , April 19th, 1880. 
Origin of the Lung Plague in America .—Though the bovine 
race represented by the buffalo have been undoubtedly coeval 
with man on the Western Continent, and though domesticated 
cattle have been in existence in all the settlements since first 
introduced in the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Lung 
Plague of cattle was unknown on these shores until 1843. In 
that year Peter Dunn, a milkman, near South Perry, Brooklyn, 
purchased a cow from an English ship, and placed her with the 
rest of his herd. Some weeks later this cow sickened and died, 
and infected other cows in his stable. Erom this the plague soon 
spread to other stables in the vicinity, including the great dis¬ 
tillery stables in Skillman Street, and in a few years it had overrun 
Brooklyn, New York, and Jersey City, and extended somewhat into 
the country. Many are still living who recollect all the facts of 
the advent of the plague, and of the ruinous losses that over¬ 
took many of the unfortunate dairymen. 
Wm. Meakim, of Flushing,- informs us that his father, 
William Meakim, kept a large dairy at Bushwick, L. I., which 
was infected in 1849 by the carelessness of an employe, who 
hauled a dead cow from a Brooklyn stable with his (MeakirAs) 
working oxen. In a few weeks the oxen sickened and died 
