The Express.
London, England, 1865-10-21 00:00:00

glite Orareini.

TO 001201YONDINTI.
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LONDON. SATURDAY. OCTOBER 21.

IF we look back only a month we shall find
that, in comparison with to-day, our state of mind
about the Cattle Plague was one of bewilderment,
helplessness, and hopelessness. All that is said,
now against indiscriminate daughter may be very
true ; but it should ever be remembered that the
recommendation was made, and the method
adopted when nobody seemed to have anything
else to propose. We stand in a very different
position now—little u we as yet know, and
inefficient as has been the serve which should

by this time have provided us with a
body of well arranged facts, regarding the
character and course of the disease, and the
extent of the mischief it has wrought. We now
know that the disease is curable, and that on"

mode of treatment has cured one-fourth, and auo-

ther one-half, of the sick cattle subjected to ik
We hear of cures in so many different directions,

in recommendation of a variety of medicines and
methods, that, if we cannot believe in all the
medicines and methods, we can at least appreciate

,
the fact of many of the plague-Ariakea cattle
having recovered. We can perceive in society •
great change of tone even among the moat ex-
citable alarmists. Nobody now expects • clean

sweep of all our herds and flocks, or an unremit-
ting pestilence of ten years ; and everybody can
tell of some wonderful escape of A's, or B's, or
_ .

C's dairy or herd, in the midst of a suffering dis-
trict, or of wonderful reooveries ; and it seems to
be universally believed that our Russian and other
continental correspondents are right in declaring
that beasts that have recovered are safe from the
disease for ever after. _ . .

We want something more precise and practical,
however, than this general encouragement, while
the encouragement itself is practically useful in
rousing our faculties and stimulating our activity.
To us it appears that two points are already suffi-
ciently well illustrated to guide our practice. The
one is that the preventive method employed by
the homeopathists deserves a trial on the largest
scale. The common sneer against that system of
practice—that if it does no good it can do no
harm—is a reason for its being tried in the way of
prevention, even by those who would hesitate to
trust it in urgent cases of seizure. The testimony
must, of course, in the nature of things, be of a
negative sort in regard to preventive virtues ; but
the testimony is very strong in the present
case. It does appear that large herds, and
many of them, have remained healthy in
the heart of suffering districts ; and if it is
the actual fact that, as Mr. CAIRD writes from the
Hague, half the sick have recovered under the
care of homoeopathic practitioners, we may well
look forward with hope, greater than we had ex-
pected to arise so soon. In a few days, those
Belgian homoeopathists, so successful in Holland,
will publish their method and show us how to pro-
ceed. Meantime, that principle of practice seems
to have done more for us already than any other.
The other point is that the very first attention
should be paid to the skin of the sickening animal.
When our stockinasters and farmers read recom-
mendations to steam the cattle, as is done in
Russia, Germany, the Black Sea countries, &c.,
and get lost among details of stoves, inclined
planes for floors, and degrees of beat, specified in
terms unknown to common people in England, the
anxious readers may well sigh, and think it is all
very fine for folk who are accustomed
to such ways, but no use talking about
it for British farmers who cannot command
the means, all in a hurry. But we are learning
that stones and inclined floors and unintelligible
thermometers are not necessary, more or leas, for
the object. Some people, we believe, follow the
foreign method so far as to make a steam bath
by throwing water (in the absence of a heated
stove) over hot bricks or stones, in a smell en-
closed space, or by placing the sick animal over a
hole in the ground whence steam is made to issue;
but it is much easier, and apparently more offer
tual, to make the animal its own stove, the gene-
rator of the steam by which it is to recover. The
wet-sheet treatment can be practised where the
animal stands, and without any delay or difficulty.
Instead of the sheet, employed in human fever
cases, it is now a series of blankets or rugs, and a
sufficient number of them, wet and dry, produces
the sweating which is the turning point to reco-
very. It is not our business hers to discuss the
various prescriptions of medicines ; those which j
accompany the skin treatment seem to be very
simple, and, in fact, have a subordinate interest
in the, case. A little time and experience will
settle their respective values; and meanwhile it has
become clear that the first and moat promising
course on the appearance of the premonitory dry-
ness of the skin is to act on and through the skin
in the moat effectual manner. We hear of various
methods--steaming, rubbing down, covering up,
icc.—but the best of these are mere faint attempts
to produce the effects which follow completely from
wet blankets well covered iu by a sufficiency of dry
rugs, and followed tip by warm dry covering when
the wet has answered its purpose.
Here is something prudes'. What more we