CORRESPONDENCE. 
81 
on commons and highways, and thereby infect each other. 
The non-contagionists allege that the malady is due to incle¬ 
ment weather, exposure, etc., but facts are antagonistic to this 
theory, as no season furnishes fewer cases than winter and spring, 
when the weather is the most trying. But, during the winter 
and spring, the cattle are, for a long period, kept indoors or con¬ 
fined to fenced yards, so that the opportunities for infection pas¬ 
sing from herd to herd are at their minimum. If the chances of 
contagion were as numerous in winter as in summer, there can be 
no doubt that the rigor of the season would increase the prevalence 
of the disease, but inasmuch as the cold and variable season which 
so strongly predisposes to all inflammatory lung diseases is that 
which presents the fewest cases, we must look for some other expla¬ 
nation which will not contradict the facts. This is to be found 
only in the increased facilities for contagion in summer, and the 
comparative‘absence of such facilities in winter. 
All other facts in the history of the disease in America, lead 
to the same conclusion. It prevailed uninterruptedly in places, 
like the now memorable Blissville stables, where cattle were 
brought from all quarters and crowded together in a close build¬ 
ing. As soon as a diseased animal was introduced, such a place 
was infected and remained so as long as occupied. Another 
grand source of the disease was the dealer’s stable, and in the 
great majority of cases the infection of a herd in a new locality 
could be traced to one or more cows bought from a dealer. In 
short, wherever cattle were being constantly changed, and where 
there was the opportunity of the introduction into a stable of an 
infected beast, that stable became an infected place and a persis¬ 
tant source of new outbreaks wherever its inmates might be 
taken. 
Nor can the unwholesome conditions of distillery stables on 
the one hand, nor the privations to which dealers’ cattle are sub¬ 
jected on the other, be invoked as causes of the illness. Our 
western States are no more salubrious than those on the Atlantic 
sea-board, yet the distillery stables of the west develop no such 
baleful product, and the steers brought from the west, though 
they travel one hundred miles for every one traversed by the 
