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of treatment, and final disappearance of the disease, the minister of the interior is fully advised.

Among the preventive means adopted in cases of cattle plague are the following: Separation from healthy cattle. Shepherds and cattle-feeders are not allowed to visit infected places. Purchases of cattle, milk, hides, or tallow, in infected districts, to be carried to healthy places, are forbidden. Persons attending diseased cattle must wash their hands in a solution of potash and vinegar, and change their clothes before approaching healthy cattle. When dead animals are removed in carts drawn by horses, care must be taken that no liquid matter is dropped. Neither skin, horns, nor hoofs may be removed from a dead animal which must be buried deeply, far from dwellings of man and feeding-places of cattle, in open rather than wooded spaces, where they may not be liable to be dug up by wolves or other animals.

In the Netherlands, provision has been made by law for the prohibition of importation and transit of cattle and the holding of cattle markets, and regulations have been established relating to the sale, treatment, and disinfection of living or dead cattle, meat, hides, hair, wool, dung, and other offal. Any animal removed and sold, to evade the provisions of the law, may be seized and confiscated, and punishment by fine of 25 to 500 florins, and imprisonment for eight days to three months, are penalties of its transgression. A liberal indemnification is made for all animals laughtered by order if the disease has been made known by the proprietor himself.

Stringent regulations are enforced by law in Prussia. Medical treatment is forbidden, as also the recommending and publicly advertising of remedies.

Legal measures, various in character and complete in details as experience and practical wisdom are able to suggest, are also enforced in France, Belgium, Austria, Denmark, Switzerland, Bavaria, Saxony, Hanover, Baden, and by other (and probably all) governments of Europe.

AMERICAN CATTLE IN DANGER.

It would be strange if America should escape the visitation many years. Cholera, arising in the east, has traversed Asia and continental Europe, leaped the North sea, and passed the ocean barriers repeatedly. Diphtheria and other subtle animal poisons have been disseminated over islands and continents. Deadly murrains have decimated or destroyed the herds of all nations in all ages. Apparently new forms of disease appear occasionally, destroying particular genera of animals, while others escape unscathed. This cattle plague is not altogether new in Europe, having been traced back, by characteristic manifestations, a thousand years and more, during which time at least six separate outbreaks in Britain are chronicled. America has never yet been visited, so far as is known. but who can guarantee continued immunity?

When the red men roamed the forest alone, they were free from European infectious diseases. That exemption ceased with the landing of the colonists at Jamestown, and the arrival of the Mayflower in Massachusetts bay. Our cattle have hitherto been subject, in a limited degree, to occasional epizootic outbreaks, in their comparative isolation and freedom from disease-producing influences. Importations of foreign cattle are fortunately prohibited, yet infection may come at any moment, wafted by the winds of commerce, in a bale of wool, a bag of rags, a bundle of hides, a package of horns, a crate of crockery, or in a single straw, or in the clothing of a herdsman, for it has been proved that the infection can live and multiply after many months of rest.

And if it comes, what shall hinder its sweeping the country, and destroying as many millions of dollars as would suffice to connect the Mississippi and the Hudson by a ship canal that should be ample for the transportation of the products of a continent? We have had one warning. Pleuro-pneumonia, which has

ravaged portions of Europe during the past half century, was a few years since introduced into Massachusetts; and but for the prompt and vigorous action of the legislature of that State, by which diseased and exposed animals were slaughtered and the disease thus "stamped out," the losses of cattle-owners might have been many millions of money, if not millions of cattle.

But a worse than the pleuro pneumonia is the rinderpest. In some countries the recoveries do not exceed five per cent., and (if it is not a witticism) a portion of those which recover ultimately die before they reach the butcher. Lancisi, a great Italian writer, declared that the cures spread the disease. When this disease approaches, the knife is the proper medicine, arterial bleeding the only radical cure; yet there would be hesitation here as elsewhere, and delay and paltering with remedies. Already a dozen have been proposed in advance, and a score of ridiculous theories of its nature and cure propounded; and some have recognized its actual outbreak in Pennsylvania, and others again in Kentucky. American nature is human nature, and cattle plague history would again repeat itself. As in 1750, the sixth year of the fourth visitation, which lasted twelve years in England, when people complained that the sick beasts were not killed soon enough, there would be loud outeries against the dangerous dilatoriness or reckless cupidity that hoped for cures while spreading infection. As then, after years of killing and saving, and the lamentation that "Cheshire might have saved 6,000 if the farmer at Elton had killed his cattle," there would be the same mistaken mercy mingled with wholesome severity, the same concealments and hesitation, similar declarations of the incurability of the disease and the folly of treatment, and after all, at the last record of the eventful history it would be written of some Doctor Jones or Veterinary Smith, that "a never-failing remedy had been discovered." Thus "hope springs eternal in the human breast," and the dire plague "never is, but always to be" cured.

Great Britain has enacted a stringent and effectual law, which effectually set a barrier to the regular weekly increase of attacks, and secured a constant and rapid decline of the disease. The Congress of the United States would pass no similar law for killing and compensating by wholesale. The matter has already been broached among members of Congress, and State rights have stood as a lion in the way. The subject is referred to the several States, as a matter of domestic and local concern, and here would be one great danger in the case of an outbreak in this country. Thirty-six States would have thirty-six separate and diverse laws on the subject, but for the fact that half of them would have none at all, at least for the first year or two, or until the infection was almost remedilessly spread throughout their borders.

Then if the railroad system of England, with its systematic vigilance and watchful care, is the means of extending the disease, what reeking infection might not be conveyed on our uncleaned cattle trucks and uncared-for railway cattle pens.

Scarcely a government in Europe has neglected to enact laws for arresting the spread of this fatal disease. These laws commonly have the following objects:

1. To make it the legal duty of the stock-owner to give the earliest notice of its approach.

2. To arm either the local authorities or the executive with power to isolate or slaughter herds.

3. To make pecuniary compensation for animals slaughtered.

4. To provide a supply of competent veterinary surgeons.

It is urgently suggested, in conclusion, that State legislatures take up, at the earliest possible moment, the question of permanent general enactments, applicable to all virulent, infectious, or contagious diseases, and pass such laws as the security of farm stock within the several States may require. Massachusetts has already an efficient law of this character.

DONATIONS.

Donors and their donations to the museum of the Department of Agriculture.

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Mr. Budd T. Glover

Mrs. G. H.Pennfield

R. O. Thompson
E. C. Rice....

G. J. Abbott..

John Bowles

Washington, D. C.....
Utica, N. Y
Bethany, N. Y

Beaver, Utah..
For Mrs. Phillips, Del..
Marietta, Penn...
Schuykill Falls, Penn.
Northup, Utah
Washington, D. C.....
Saginaw, Mich......

Rochester, N. Y ...
For Chinese government

Paris, France
Greensburg, Ind..
Washington, D. C
Litchfield, Mich.
Mt. Gilead, Ohio
U. S. consul at Stettin
Washington, D C....
Pittsburg, Penn
San Francisco, Cal
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Georgetown, D. C
Minnesota
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Vinton Station, Ohio..
Eugene City, Oregon
Iowa..

Colorado...

North Star, Penn
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Paris, France

Paris, France

Fulton House, Penn California... Washington, D. C

Florida...

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Dep't Ag're, Washington, D. C Pine leaf fibre and cloth; rice paper;

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pyrethrum for destroying insects, &c.

Eight specimens emery rock.

Cotton grown in Nebraska.

Thread from China grass.

U. S. consul, Sheffield, Eng.. Splendid specimens China grass (Bob

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Augusta, Ga.

Maryland...

meria nivea,) manufactured by J. Wade and Sons, Bradford, England. Millet, two varieties.

Merino wool.

Red ochre.

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[Compiled from the monthly reports of nearly two hundred and fifty observers in more than thirty States and Territories of the Union, made to the Smithsonian Institute through this department.]

The increased and increasing attention of agriculturists to meteorology, as connected with the science and art of tilling the soil, is one of the gratifying signs of our times, presaging a future of crops more carefully adapted to climate, circumstances controlled so as to render harvests more certain, cultivators better remunerated, markets more regularly supplied, and the aggregate resources of our country greatly and permanently increased. This, with the cordial reception given to essays in the annual reports of this department, in which meteorological principles and facts are applied to agriculture, requires that those interested should have information that will enable them better to understand and apply the statements made by those writers. The present volume contains similar articles, which, it is believed, will quicken and strengthen a desire to use these tables, and to acquire more information in relation to the climatic peculiarities of our widely spread country.

Nor is this all. Those who are led to acquire information will also become. qualified to impart it. There are many subjects on which the common farmerilliterate though he deem himself or be considered by others-may gather and communicate information valuable to scientific men as well as to his fellowfarmers. The general expansive and upward activity of mind in agricultural circles indicates a dawn of important discoveries, to the unfolding of which things old as well as new may be greatly subservient. For instance and illus

tration, the Rev. George A. Leakin, of Baltimore, Maryland, has requested this department to call the attention of farmers to well-remembered seasons remarkable for droughts or rain, scanty or abundant harvests, &c., and to communicate such facts and dates to this department. To use his own words in the letter referred to

"While engaged as hospital chaplain, United States army, I was led to suspect a greater prevalence of the periodic law than was generally recognized Indeed, convinced of its universality, my main design was its extension into a realm hitherto unexplored, viz., the mental and moral. In this investigation, I could not fail to discover that famines, droughts, and abundant harvests, apparently fortuitous, were reducible to a sure recurrence, and that when the same observations were applied to them as to life insurance, we might guard against harvest failures with equal advantage.'

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This is already done in Great Britain. At least the "Royal Farmers' Insur ance Company," in London, advertises to "insure wheat, barley, oats, peas beans, rye, turnips, clover, &c., against loss by hail-storms, at moderate rates.” Mr. Leakin continues

"Did my limited observation present no fact, I could no more doubt the connexion of periodicity with the field of agriculture, than the existence of gravi tation in some unexplored island; but I have it in my power to send you the following extract of an official report made to our State Superintendent of Education on the statistics of Montgomery county, Maryland:

"The climate, though variable, is healthy, and the seasons favorable for agricultural purposes. Four remarkable droughts have occurred within the past century the first in the summer of 1806, the second in the summer of 1822, the third in the summer of 1838, the fourth in the summer of 1854-an exact period of sixteen years interval. Whether the same phenomenon will occur in 1870, remains to be seen.'

"I have been further informed, by a gentleman of the hig' est official authority, that in parts of Illinois, every seven years is marked by drought.' .

"Strikingly coincident with the above is the following: The Paris Constitutionnel gives a list of the famines and periods of scarcity in France during the last three centuries, from which it appears that in general one year of want has occurred for every six years of plenty. These statistics are true in the main of other countries besides France. In England, where the cultivation is more thorough, the periods of scarcity are less frequent. In Poland, the Ukraine and the Danubian provinces, where farming is the rudest, they occur more often It is plainly owing to some law of nature, yet undiscovered, that these unfruit ul seasons take place at comparatively regular periods. They are probably the means of recuperating the soil. In this event the average production may be greater, notwithstanding the scarcity, than if there had been no bad crops. It is within the memory of all that the summer of 1854 witnessed an excessive drought. Shrewd agriculturists suggested, even then, that the parched condition of the ground would bring to the surface the salts which pervaded the lower soil, and of which the top had been exhausted by successive crops; and they foretold in consequence an enormous harvest for 1855. Whether the theory was correct or not, it is a fact that the result verified the prediction.'

Now, Mr. Leakin, and the writers quoted by him, may or may not be correct and the few instances given in proof are insufficient to establish their theory, and would prove a variable periodicity for different localities—yet the furnishing of the information requested, if it does no more, would refute the idea, and turn the minds now engaged in its support to some more profitable, because successful, labor. Even failure is often the precedent to great success. But if acts should be collected sufficient to unfold the existence of such a law for large sections of country, what an immense gain-what a valuable saving of time, labor, and crops-would result to the farmers and the nation.

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