CONTAGION TO BE AVERTED.

It should be known that the pleuro-pneumonia often mentioned
as a scare or a myth by the thoughtless and optimist is a
stern reality. Its journeys and track of destruction among
cattle have been as marked as that of small pox and
cholera--contagious diseases which have so tearfully
decimated the human family. Lung diseases of the modern type
were known before the Christian era, and were considered by
Columella and other Latin writers. Australia resigned her
great herds to flocks of sheep, as did South Africa, never
yet recovered from the blow to her cattle industries.

England has been tardy in the publication of her losses by
lung-fever, yet it is a fact which forbids secrecy that
calamity has reached the enterprising breeders, and colossal
fortunes have been swept away by the cattle-plague. In our
own country it has been no more the policy of secretive
owners to publish facts than that of city authorities to
proclaim the prevalence of small-pox in the town. Still,
startling facts have sprung from original sources of inquiry.
A town meeting is called in the State of Connecticut,
terror-stricken owners in New Jersey, Maryland, and
Pennsylvania meet for council. Massachusetts had a Governor
twenty years ago bold in telling truth, which led to
searching investigations by experts and officers of the
State. With autocratic power they made a diagnosis of
diseases, which led to the stamping out of the infection by
law, and a truthful proclamation that the plague was stayed.