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which the animals are kept, and causing but a small percentage of casu-
alties. It may be therefore safely said that it is not rare for them to
resist or to pay a very small tribute to contagion.

Man appears to run little if any danger either from the manipula-
tion of the debris, or from consumnig the flesh of animals dead of
Rinderpest, or from drinking their milk. It is a common practice in
some parts of India, and I believe also in the other countries, for the
people to eat the flesh of animals dead of the disease, and no bad conse-
quence has ever been reported from people having done so. Dogs and
soliped animals appear to be equally refractory.

Immunity and preventive inoculation.—Animals which have
recovered from the disease acquire immunity from a future attack,
according to some authors, for the remainder of their lives, but at least
for a period of six years. I have had some instances brought to my
notice of animals having a second attack after a lapse of seven years,
and one instance of three working bullocks belonging to a planter
in the Kullu valley having a second attack, to which they succumbed
six years after the first. Other observers have found animals immune
after seven years. Mr. Hallen, Inspector-General, Civil Veterinary
Department, relates a case of three bullocks which had been attacked
with the malady seven years previously, being stalled with animals
suffering from the disease, eating their rejected forage, etc., and
resisting contagion. However this may be, the consensus of opinion is
that an animal once attacked and recovered does not take the disease
again. The knowledge of this fact is found amongst cattle owners
throughout the length and breadth of India, even in the remotest parts
of the Himalayas, where the people are, as a rule, most ignorant and
superstitious. An animal which has recovered from the disease in those
parts where it is enzootic is worth double or treble what an unprotected
one is, and the people are only too anxious to secure them.

Animals which escape death after inoculation with the virus, as it is at
present occasionally imperfectly carried out, acquire immunity. Rinder-
pest then leaves after it a peculiar condition of the organism which
renders the animals which have been the subject of it proof against a
second attack for a long, though apparently somewhat variable, period
of time.

These facts being within our knowledge and generally accepted, it
would have been strange if some efforts had not been made to produce a
mild form of the disease in animals, which would leave them immune
without running any risk of the inoculation proving fatal. The dis-
covery of such a virus would, of course, be of the utmost value in a
country like India, where methods of suppression are most difficult to
carry out. Armed with an effective protective virus, the lives of many
thousands of animals could be saved from this courge to agriculture,