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premature loss of the heads of families, who have to provide for the necessities of those
too young to gain their own living, although these are grand and noble objects which
they most properly seek to attain ; but rather to maintain amongst the people a general
standard of healthiness consistent with the full and satisfactory discharge of all
the duties of life. A large preventible mortality amongst children represents a
proportionately large diffusion of preventible debility, issuing in a weakly adult age,
producing by and by an adult population which is ready to break down under
the pressure of a variety of adverse conditions to which they must assuredly be
exposed. And if many of the circumstances which I have shown to influence the
mortality of young children be not in your power to remove now, yet as popular
sanitary knowledge advances, and as confidence in the teaching of sanitary science
becomes more established, Parliament will not fail to follow the lead of popular
opinion, and furnish you with levers which it will be your duty to employ. The
Labouring Classes Lodging House Act has been in your hands for a long period of
time, but for some cause or other, that it is not my business to inquire into, it has
failed in being adopted, Two or more Bills are now before Parliament, which
appear well calculated to promote a similar object, and it is much to be hoped that
should they pass into law, the Islington Vestry will be amongst the first to avail
themselves of their admirable provisions.
CATTLE PLAGUE.
"A contagious disease appeared amongst the milch cows about the middle of July,
, at Islington. At first the cows refused their food : the next day had
huskish coughs, and voided excrements like clay; the heads swelled, and sometimes
their bodies. In a day or two more there was a great discharge of mucous matter by
the nose, and their breaths smelt offensively. Lastly, a severe purging, (sometimes
bloody,) which terminated in death. Some died in three days, others in five or six;
but the bulls lived eight or ten. During the whole illness they refused all manner of
food, and were very hot. . . . Several physicians attempted the cure, and made
many essays for that purpose . . . I think there is no one method in practice
but what was tried on this occasion . . . but the instances of success were so few
that they do not deserve any further mention." I copy this extract not from any
account of the Rinderpest as it has occurred amongst us recently, but from an old
volume of the "Philosophical Transactions," containing a history, by a Mr. Bates, of
an outbreak of the same disease in 1714, when it first appeared, as nearly as possible,
on the very spot where it broke out in 1865. Mr. Bates says: "We went to Islington
and found that Mr. Ratcliffe had lost 120 out of 200; Mr. Ruffold, 62 out of 72, and
Mr. Pullen, 38 out of 87. They were very unwilling to own it, because so soon as it
should be known none would buy their milk." Thus does history repeat itself:
"The thing that has been, it is that which shall be, and that which is done is that
which shall be done, and there is no new thing under the sun."
Origin and Progress of the Disease in Islington.
The first cases in the parish appeared in the dairy sheds of Mrs. Nicholls, in the
Liverpool Road, on June 27th—at least that was the day on which the specific and