DR. WILLEMS. 
361 
towards evening those animals, worn out by fatigue, were elan, 
destinely introduced in a held situated near the farm of Terlamen, 
where they passed the entire night, and soiled the grass with their 
infected saliva. The next day the herd of the farmer was placed 
in the same pasture, and shortly after, almost all the animals of 
the farmer were affected with the epizooty. 
I have said that the diseased animals which often pass the road 
to the camps are to serve as food for our soldiers, who ordinarily 
eat poor meat, and that because the war administration tries, be¬ 
fore all, to buy meat at low rates. It costs from seventy to eighty 
centimes a kilo. This meat of diseased beasts is neither succulent 
nor very pleasant to eat, but, I must declare, is not injurious to 
public health. Pleuro-pneumonia not being contagious to man, 
there is no danger in consuming the meat of diseased animals, so 
long as the alteration caused by the disease has not arrived at its 
last period ; and you all, gentlemen, especially those who live in 
large cities, have eaten more than once the meat of pneumonic 
animals. 
At the time of my first experiment upon pleuro-pneumonia, 
when that disease existed with such intensity that a large number 
of animals were destroyed and consumed in the city; when the 
knacker himself, by an unaccountable toleration, sold ostensibly 
and at low price the meat of animals often pneumonic in the third 
degree, I have collected the statistics of the mortality of the 
population of Hasselt during five years (1850-1855), and 1 have 
found that during those years, where a great portion of the popu¬ 
lation were eating meat from diseased animals, well-to-do families 
especially, there were comparatively less deaths than during pre¬ 
vious years. I explain this difference in the mortality by the 
reason that meat is necessary to keep up the health of man, and 
that it is better to eat meat of pneumonic animals than not at all. 
Mr. Loiset, veterinary surgeon at Lille, is of the same opinion. 
He has shown that during a period of nineteen years, 10,000 
peripneumonic cows have been consumed, without having observed 
a single accident, without the slightest disturbance in the sanitary 
condition of the people. 
{To be continued.) 
