2 
•T. LAW. 
industries of this great country. Our entire Southern coast is 
contaminated with a poison deadly to all bovine animals that have 
not been inured to it from the earliest dawnings of life, and Dr. 
Salmon has shown that this poison is steadily advancing North¬ 
ward. 
This Poison is Inherent in the Soil , 
and in a suitable field may live and propagate in the earth 
independently of animal hosts. It is, therefore, in one sense, 
even more redoubtable than those animal contagia which have 
little or no viability or power of self-propagation out of the living 
animal body. Happily for us, as yet this redoubtable poison can 
not survive the winter frosts of our Northern States. The disease 
has to make a fresh start the next year from its perennial home 
in the Sunny South. Whether it can, by a slow and general 
advance through the intermediate climates of the middle States, 
become finally acclimated and fitted for survival in the extreme 
North, is a question that must be settled by carefully-conducted 
experiments; unless, indeed, we elect to pursue our time-honored 
policy of letting the experiment be wrought out in the natural 
way, and of ascertaining, mayhap when too late, that our North¬ 
ern herds are yearly scourged by the plague, and that our North¬ 
ern pastures have become permanently saturated with the deadly 
germs. The prevalence of this poison on the whole coast of the 
Gulf of Mexico and on the islands in the Gulf, suggests that it is 
an indigenous germ, generated in some way in that particular 
soil, and hence we must learn much more than we know of its 
history before we can decide whether it will ever be possible to 
stamp it out. At present we can prevent its 
Yearly Summer Invasions 
of the North, and its slower but more permanent advances in the 
middle States ; we can even habituate young animals to its influ¬ 
ence, so that they may not fall victims to its ravages; but we can 
not promise by any known measures to purify the already con¬ 
taminated Southern States and guarantee them wholesome to 
cattle brought from without. 
Take another prevalent plague : tuberculosis. There cannot 
