22 
attachable to him as a member of the medical profession, he largely contributed to the 
defeat of the measure. New York accordingly still groans under her imported and 
indigenous diseases. It is a matter of frequent observation with me that glandered 
horses are preserved for years, exposed in all sorts of public places and highways, kept 
in livery stables, sold or traded to unsuspecting persons and worked on thrashing 
machines which are travelled over the country, bringing them in daily contact with new 
and healthy studs, the stalls, mangers and buckets of which they share, to the deadly 
peril alike of the beasts and their masters. Intestinal fever of swine is frequently import¬ 
ed, proving fatal to whole herds and rendering the hog-pens untenable. Texan fever has 
recently devastated three separate localities in the centre of the state, and I believe I am 
correct in stating that the dairies of the metropolitan city herself, are still being ravaged 
by that insidious foe, of the mythical nature of which our medical member of assembly felt 
so confident. Yet in the face of all this and much more our Executive is legally helpless 
Now the people must be instructed m these matters, and it is our duty in particular 
to lay the matter before them. We must not leave our physicians in a position to honest¬ 
ly plead ignorance when they have placed in jeopardy their reputations as men of sci¬ 
ence, and discredited their profession by denying pathological facts of the most notorious 
kind. We must place before them in the shortest and plainest terms the history of 
these diseases, and show what momentous questions in political economy are involved 
in their characteristic of communicability from animal to animal. We must show, in 
reference to the lung fever for example, that it was unwittingly described by Lancisi 
Kanold, Ramazzini and others as prevailing extensively in Europe in connection with 
Rinderpest in the early part of the last century, having been propagated by the same 
cause, namely, contagion from the travelling commissariat parks of the armies in the 
field. We must show them how the immortal Haller testified to its dangerously con¬ 
tagious properties, as seen by him in the Jura mountains at that period. We must show 
how it invaded Ireland in 1839-40, and England in 1842, in the bodies of Dutch cattle, 
and has prevailed in these countries uninterruptedly since, ravaging especially those 
parts into which foreign cattle or those from the large fairs are brought, and avoiding 
localities, no matter how cold and exposed, into which strange cattle are never taken, 
but where the whole supply is by the natural increase of the native stock. We must 
show how it reached the Cape of Good Hope and Australia by imported cattle, destroy¬ 
ing stock almost beyond computation, and how it is still proceeding on its career of 
destruction. We must tell how it was imported into New York in 1843 and 1850 by 
Dutch and English cows, and has since silently spread over nearly our whole eastern 
seaboard. 
On the other hand we must illustrate how the exclusively breeding districts in even 
the most plague-ravaged states have escaped, just so far as they have avoided the pur¬ 
chase and introduction of strange stock, as exemplified in Great Britian before the Free 
Trade Act of 1842, and in many parts of the Scottish Highlands, the Cheviots, the 
Channel Islands, Spain, Portugal and Normandy, up to the present time. We must 
show further, how in certain states in which it had gained a footing—as in Sweeden, 
Norway, Denmark, Schleswig, Oldenburg, Switzerland, Massachusetts, Connecticut and 
New Jersey—it was stamped out, and definitely excluded, by the destruction of the 
sick, and the adoption of thorough measures of segregation and disinfection. We must 
illustrate how Europe has lost thousands of millions from this disease, and how certain 
we too are to suffer in ecpial ratio, if we neglect the pestilence until it reaches our great 
Southern and Western stock ranges, the great source of supply for all our Eastern markets ^ 
