PLEURO-PNEUMONIA. 
persons to take care of, aud places to keep such cattle in, without exposure to 
others. Here was a herd of valuable cattle, cows valued by Mr. Paysou at from 
eighty to one hundred and titty dollars. Certainly if any animals were worth 
keeping through a siege of the disease these were. Perhaps on no other farm in 
this State is there that precise care taken of stock, so as to be able to tell the 
profit or loss attending it ; no one could here complain of the danger ot exposure 
to other herds, this being the only one on the island. In short, if there be a 
place in this Commonwealth where such an experiment can be carried on suc¬ 
cessfully, it would seem that Deer Island is that place; or if there be any cattle 
worth thus expeiimentiug with, such stock as they had there is that stock. It 
had been found that in many cases where cattle were killed, the effects of tbe 
disease were so slight that no one would pronounce the beef unhealthy for food. 
Mi. I ayson had killed an ox ot this herd that Dr. Thayer, as a physician, had ad- 
\ised him to use. I proposed that if this herd must all be slaughtered, the stock 
appealing to be healthy be held by Mr. Paysou, so that should there be any such 
cases as leferred to, tbe State might not lose their whole appraisal; the Com¬ 
missioners having previously decided that the law did not allow them to dispose 
oi the beef when the slightest trace of the disease was found. But this proposi¬ 
tion was rejected. In a single day’s slaughtering were found two oxen ap¬ 
praisee at two hundred aud forty-seven dollars and fifty cents, ($247.50,) and 
would have brought more than two hundred dollars in market; which both my 
associates decided they should not hesitate to eat or give to their families, but 
which we could not sell. The herd was slaughtered, with the exception of four 
cows, two yearlings and a calf; aud these were saved, not, as the report of the 
Commissioners might lead one to conclude, for them to try an experiment with, 
but because Mr. Paysou would rather run the risk of their having the disease 
than to suffer the loss he would, if he accepted the appraisal. Fourteen of the 
thirty-five slaughtered by the Commissioners were more or less diseased; two 
of them would probably have died. 
Up to this time not the slightest evidence has been found that tbe disease 
was brought to the island from other herds ; and yet several of the daily papers 
of Bosoon published articles calculated, if not intended, to lead the public to 
believe that the disease had been traced to a yoke of oxen bought of a man in 
New Hampshire, who, four years ago, sent the disease to Quincy. It is true 
that the lungs appearing to have been longest affected were takeu from a yoke 
of oxen Mr. Paysou bought last May of a man bearing the same family name of 
him who it is said sold the cattle which caused the trouble at Quincy in 1861. 
But it is also true that the oxen bought by Mr. Paysou had stood in the same 
stable, eaten at the same rack, drank at the same trough, worked in the same 
field, aud been with through the entire summer, three or four other yoke of 
oxen, all of which were killed, aud no trace of the disease found. It is also true 
that they had never been with any other cattle of the diseased herd, were kept 
in a barn separated from them by a distance of several rods, aud the only possi¬ 
ble exposure there could have been for them was in that all drank at the same 
trough, but never at the same time. It is also true that Mr. Payson had worked 
these oxen through the entire season without having had the least idea of their 
having been diseased. He says that some time during the summer one of the 
oxen did not thiive as well as he thought ho ought to have done, and he ordered 
a little more grain to be put into his food. These facts are worth uoticiun, as 
07 
