THE RECENT CATTLE DISEASE IN KANSAS. 
293 
years, that foot-and-mouth disease existed in certain localities in 
the West. Results always disproved such allegations, for the 
disease in question never entered our western stock-yards, nor 
spread over our Middle and Eastern States, as it must inevitably 
have done had it been the foot-and-mouth disease which prevailed 
at the source of our cattle traffic. As all such reports that have 
come under my notice referred to the period of winter, when the 
animals were confined to an aliment of dry hay or cornstalks, and 
as cattle only were mentioned as having suffered, it is almost cer¬ 
tain that the trouble then, as now, was but the result of ergoted 
or smutty fodder. That the observers in all such instances should 
have mistaken the ergotism for the contagious plague is not sur¬ 
prising, because of a certain similarity of symptoms, by the 
emphasizing of which the account of the dietetic disease could be 
made to read exactly like that of the contagious one, as witnessed 
in the letters and newspaper reports quoted in the earlier part of 
this paper. The mistake is the more easily explained that no work 
on the practice of veterinary medicine in the English language, 
with the single exception of my “ Farmer’s Veterinary Adviser, ’’ 
treats of ergotism. In England the disease is unknown, and 
American veterinary books are mostly republications of English 
ones. 
In Tessier’s experiments on pigs, the first effects were redness 
of the eyes and ears ; the latter organs and the limbs then grew 
cold, the joints swelled, gangrene attacked the ears, limbs, and 
tail, and the animal died in convulsions. One of them, six months 
old, lived for sixty-six days. Its intestines were described as in¬ 
flamed and gangrenous. (Mem. de la Soc. de Med.) Here, in 
another class of animals, is shown the same tendency to disorders 
in the skin and alimentary mucous membrane. 
In Millet’s observations on gallinacese the comb became cold, 
purple, black, withered, and dried, the beak and sometimes the 
feet shriveled up and died, and gangrenous patches covered the 
walls of the abdomen. Tessier noticed that in palmipeds the bill 
and tip of the tongue withered up, and Decoste that the web be¬ 
tween the toes blackened, dried up, hardened, and together with 
the toes, dropped off. This tendency to implicate the bill and 
