116 
THE PLAGUE IN KANSAS. 
necessary to support them with gruel. Such animals stand 
smacking their lips, grinding the teeth and slobbering profusely. 
In Kansas the mouth symptoms were much less intense than this; 
some of the mouths presented erosions which were mostly small 
and very superficial. In Missouri some of the cattle had their 
mouths involved to a greater degree than any I saw in Kansas, 
but others with equally bad feet had perfectly sound mouths. 
Here I saw pieces of the mucus membrane becoming detached, 
but no blisters. 
“ The interdigital spaces and the coronet are the seat of erup¬ 
tion in foot and mouth disease; not only is there redness, heat 
and swelling on those parts, but there is a formation of blisters, 
and a liquid secretion from the whole affected surface of the skin. 
Sometimes abscesses form beneath the horn, from which the pus 
may burrow and cause the loss of the hoofs, or even affect the 
ligaments and joints, but severe complications in the region of 
the foot do not occur, except from this cause. With the cattle 
which I visited the feet presented a very different appearance. 
The complete death of the foot to the fetlock, or even higher, as 
occurred in all the worst cases in the West, is altogether unheard 
of in the foot and mouth disease. In only one case that I have 
heard off in the West was there auy appearance of an eruption of 
the udder of the affected cow. An eruption of blisters on the 
udder is an extremely common occurrence in the foot and mouth 
disease. 
* 
“ The disease which I investigated had few if any character¬ 
istics of foot and mouth disease. Among the whole number 
there was not a single animal which presented the typical charac¬ 
teristics of this plague. There did not even appear to be a single 
animal which represented even the typical mouth symptoms or 
the typical feet symptoms of that disease. There is but one cause 
known to veterinary science which is capable of producing the 
condition of limbs which we saw in many of the diseased animals in 
Kansas and Missouri, and that is ergot. The peculiarities of the 
disease led me to examine the feed, to learn if any unusual quan¬ 
tity of ergot could be found. The result of this examination was 
to show that at every one of the farms where the diseased cattle 
