REPORT ON DISEASES OF DOMESTIC ANIMALS 
223 
birds, and even reptiles and fishes, but which may be successfully 
inoculated from any one of these upon the human subject. The 
malady when conveyed to the human being is a very deadly one, 
whether it shows itself on the surface in the form of malignant 
pustule (Siberian boil plague), or internally, as carbuncular sore 
throat or intestinal anthrax. In this country it prevails mostly 
among butchers, tanners, and workers in hair, but is also well 
known as the result of consuming the flesh of infected animals. 
Infection from simple contact is by no means uncommon. Quite 
recently I saw an outbreak in which 100 cattle and 3 men suffered. 
In a second, 12 cattle and 2 men. In a third, a cat conveyed the 
malady to a young lady who nursed it. Where the disease be¬ 
comes widespread, the resulting human mortality may be excessive, 
as when in 1770, 15,000 men died in six weeks, in San Domingo, 
from eating the diseased beef. Cooking is a very insufficient pro¬ 
tection, as the resting spores have been shown to survive a boiling 
temperature, and, in particular cases, even 300 Far., and a whole 
family were poisoned in Aberdeen, Scotland, by the beef that had 
been boiled for hours in broth. Further, and contrary to what 
holds with most forms of virus, it is not essential that the skin 
should be broken in order to its absorption, and numerous in¬ 
stances can be adduced in which fatal results followed when it 
was deposited on the sound skin. Frost has no influence on its 
potency, and I have known a number of animals fatally infected 
by licking the blood from a stoneboat, when the temperature was 
below zero. Nor is time nor putrefaction to be relied on. I have 
known cattle to perish promptly after lapping the liquids that 
leached from a grave in which an infected carcass had been buried 
nearly a year before. I have further known pastures, on which 
the disease had been developed for the first time in the memory 
of the inhabitants, maintain their infecting qualities for six years 
in succession, and to yield hay which continued to infect animals 
when fed to them at a distance from such pastures. 
Being enthetic rather than infectious, this malady fortunately 
rarely attains to the dimensions of a plague, and rarely extends 
very widely from its true sources of origin. These are mostly in 
damp lands with a soil rich in decomposing organic matters, and 
