186 
GEORGE FLEMING. 
vaccination, I may as well state that the apprehended danger 
from these disorders is more or less purely imaginary. Conta¬ 
gious pleuro-pneumonia is peculiar to cattle, and carmot be trans¬ 
mitted in any form to other species, not even by direct inoculation 
of its morbid products; glanders is not a bovine disease, and all 
attempts to convey it to the ox tribe have invariably failed; an¬ 
thrax runs its course too rapidly, and is too marked a disease to 
be considered in connection with animal vaccination ; the worm 
disorders have no relation to the subject under discussion; while 
as for “ entozootic asthma,” why, I never heard of it before, and 
I fancy nobody else, so that it may also be dismissed as unworthy 
of consideration. Candidly speaking, if I anticipated any danger 
in animal vaccination, from the presence of constitutional disease 
in the vaccinated calf—which I do not at present—I would rather 
be inclined to look upon the existence of tuberculosis with some 
suspicion; but this serious malady the speaker did not refer to. 
There is, however, no evidence that it can be conveyed to man¬ 
kind by retro vaccination; and, to my mind, the risk is so infini¬ 
tesimal, considering that the calf is so rarely affected with the 
disease, at least in an active form, that I think it may not be taken 
into account just now. 
Of infinitely greater importance is the relationship between 
human small-pox and cow-pox, which was treated as a merely col¬ 
lateral subject at the conference, but was, nevertheless, made the 
occasion for some strong opinions being expressed as to the abso¬ 
lute identity of the two maladies. The solution of the problem 
as to whether small-pox and cow-pox are one and the same dis¬ 
ease, modified only in their manifestations by differences in the 
organism of man and the ox, or whether they are distinct and 
independent disorders, having only a family or generic resem¬ 
blance, well deserves the most serious efforts; constituting, as it 
does, a question of the very highest scientific and practical inter¬ 
est, and one about which there should be nothing speculative. 
Its practical aspect more particularly invites examination, for if 
it be demonstrated that the two are identical, the cow-pox being, 
derived from small-pox, then there is no occasion to hesitate as to 
the selection of vaccine lymph; for we might, without compunc- 
