It is useless to expatiate at length on the state of general derangement and disease in which these oxen reach their final destination. Some amongst them have endured for eight or nine days these unspeakable tortures, without being sustained by nourishment--for no animal, when his spirits forsake him, can assimilate his food amidst all this physical suffering and so great a shock to his nervous system.
Let us here declare that these animals, though removed from their meadows with all the signs and appearances of sound health, at a time when a fine season had been productive of abundance, and when no epizootia was raging in the country which they have left, may nevertheless bear within them the taint of contagious typhus; and let us ask ourselves what must come to pass in those disastrous years when this typhus prevails under the influence of those destructive causes which were passed in review just now, and when the Russian and Hungarian proprietors, eager to forestall an inevitable general calamity, hasten to send off to Italy, France, Holland, Finland, or to the ports of England, many animals already seized with typhus, and whose virus must have acquired infectious properties still more intense and deadly under the influence of the deep disquiet and commotion which the removal and conveyance of these animals, under conditions so deplorable, must have produced in their frames.
Such are indeed the pernicious conditions in which oxen may be, and often are, dispatched to England; and such appears to be the real cause of the outbreak of the spreading epizootia which we witness at this moment, and which has created so much alarm in so many counties of England.[B]
Let us now consider this contagious typhus in its destructive extension over the British soil; let us study and examine the causes of its diffusion as they pass under our notice.
The mooted question of determining whether the cattle typhus was originally imported from abroad, or whether it broke out spontaneously in England, has been, and still is, a subject of dubious debate amongst some professional men, amongst the leading writers of the public journals, and also amongst agriculturists and farmers.[C]
And, in truth, the propagation of the distemper is occasionally witnessed under conditions so singular and striking, that it seems to warrant and supply arguments for every conceivable opinion.