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foot and mouth disease. 
Britain of cattle from any country in which said disease 
exists, we feel it our duty to state the facts of the case so far as 
this country is concerned. After a most extended and almost 
exhaustive inquiry, your commission have been able to find no 
trace of foot and mouth disease, apart from herds just landed 
from Great Britain, and those herds have been in every case 
segregated until the infection has entirely disappeared. The 
nature and scope of our inquiry may be deduced from our report 
for 1881. Beginning with the great rendezvous of cattle at 
Kansas City, Council Bluffs and Omaha, we have made careful 
investigations along all the lines of cattle traffic as far as the 
eastern seaboard. In this investigation we have included all the 
great stock yards where cattle are detained for feeding, watering, 
sale, &c.; all the great feeding stables connected with distilleries 
and starch, glucose and other factories ; all the city dairies where 
stockyards exist and where the herds are replenished from such 
stockyards, and to a large extent the great dairying districts into 
which cows are drawn from the above-named stock yards and 
lines of travel. Up to the present date we have made observa¬ 
tions in the stock yards at the seaboard, the terminal end of our 
cattle traffic, and that to which all infection must gravitate, but 
apart from the imported cases above referred to, we have been 
unable to find a single case of the foot and mouth disease com¬ 
plained of. 
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MALADY. 
The significance of the entire absence of this disease along 
the whole line of our cattle traffic and in the herds into which 
this traffic leads, can only be appreciated when considered in its 
relation to the nature of the disease and the unmistakable 
symptoms by which it is manifested. The following points are 
specially to be noted : 
First —The foot and mouth disease is, perhaps, the most con¬ 
tagious malady known. It rarely enters a herd without striking 
down all the members of that herd simultaneously or nearly so. 
Second —The susceptibility to the disease is all but universal 
on the part of warm blooded animals, but all cloven footed 
