ADDRESS DELIVERED AT COMMENCEMENT EXERCISES. 
7 
ambush, and the charged mine. It is not the line-of-battle-ship, 
pouring forth her whole broadsides of flame and shot, but the 
deadly torpedo, pregnant with disaster, but hidden under the de¬ 
ceitful calm of the smooth waters. 
The disease is not epidemic, forsooth, when the single stable 
at Blissville has furnished its suffering animals by flfties ; when 
scarcely a cow-stable in Hew York or Brooklyn can present a 
clean bill of health for the past year ; when the malady prevails 
most extensively in six different States; and when, in spite of a 
current of cattle traflic strongly opposed to its progress, it has 
eaten its way for three hundred miles into the heart of the coun¬ 
try, and is to-day, more virulent if possible, at the extreme limits 
of this area than at the point from which it started. I wonder 
what in the judgment of the objectors would constitute an epi¬ 
zootic ! I can understand how stockholders who come near to 
the subject, or the general public who have not studied the re¬ 
production and rapid increase of specific disease-poisons in the 
systems of the sick, should clamor for a cure, and attach impor¬ 
tance to certain percentage of recoveries. But that men who 
have studied the laws of contagion and of the propagation of 
epizootics, should lend themselves to belittle a most insidious and 
fatal epizootic, which is itself an exotic, is almost incredible. 
The susceptible ox inspires the imponderable particles floating- 
in the air of an inflected shed, and these particles go on multiply¬ 
ing for weeks and months, and float forth with every breath ex¬ 
pired from the lungs ; hour by hour and day by day does this go 
on, and finally when the victim succumbs, its respiratory organs 
are infiltrated with 20, 30, or 40 pounds of virus, the product of 
the germs in the original inhalation, that were so infinitesimal 
that modern physics has no balance delicate enough to weigh 
them. Those of you who have a taste for figures may amuse 
yourselves with an approximate computation of the possibilities 
of infection from one such case of sickness. If we did not start 
with the imponderables, but were to allow each animal a full 
ioo grain of infecting material, and if all the products of our sick 
animals could be utilized for the infection of others, half the 
cattle of these United States might be contaminated from one 
