708 OBSERVATIONS ON THE LUNG PLAGUE OF CATTLE. 
weather, and to the transitions from the hot, close, reeking 
stable to the chilly blasts out of doors. But from June onward, 
so long as the really hot weather lasted, the number of victims 
in a herd was greatly increased, the cases succeeded each other 
with a hitherto unexampled rapidity, and nearly every case 
proved severe and rapid in its course, so that death frequently 
resulted in two or three days after the animal was noticed to be 
ill. In our cool, dry winters the course of the disease is mild, 
so that the patients survive for weeks, and even months, often 
becoming frightfully emaciated, and present the spectacle of 
walking skeletons, whereas in the burning summer and autumn 
death often comes so speedily that the carcase may present the 
round, plump, fat appearance of an animal that has died sud¬ 
denly by accident. Of this high summer mortality the cases of 
Meakim and Albertson (pages 620 and 621) are illustrative ex¬ 
amples. As further illustrating this point: Joseph Schwab, 
One-hundred and Forty-ninth Street and Southern Boulevard, 
New York, bought a cow, which soon sickened and infected his 
herd, so that he lost twenty-three head in two months, and but 
seven recovered. In autumn, 1878, Bischoff, Long Island City, 
bought four cows of a dealer, all of which sickened, and only 
one was saved. Mr. Yalentine, of Jamaica, L. I., bought some 
infected cows from two Brooklyn dealers, and by August, 1879, 
his herd was so badly diseased that we w r ere compelled to 
slaughter the whole. Patrick McCabe bought five cows from 
a dealer; sickness appeared among them six weeks later. He 
lost the whole five, and within two months thereafter four 
more that he had laid in later. 
The Losses must Increase as the Plague Leaches the Warmer 
States. —It is needless to multiply instances such as those given 
above. A mortality of seventy, eighty, or ninety per cent, in 
South Africa, and in the warm season in New York, implies 
that we would suffer an equal mortality in the Southern States 
throughout the greater part of the year, and in the hot summers 
of the Mississippi Yalley, so that no estimate of losses deduced 
from the statistics of England or Western Europe will furnish 
fair data for estimating our own in case of a general infection of 
the United States. England with 6,000,000 head of cattle has 
lost 10,000,000 dollars a year for forty years past. We with 
37,000,000 head should therefore lose 60,000,000 dollars, plus 
the extra losses consequent on the spread of the plague in the 
semi-tropical summers of Texas, the Mississippi Yalley and the 
Plains, where the great bulk of our cattle is kept. 
Present Losses from the Lung Plague in the United States .— 
Of the present losses from the lung plague in the United States 
two items may be quoted as being more tangible than such 
