Vegetarian cookery

They were, perhaps, driven a considerable way to a port of embarkation, huddled into ships, taken across the seas, exposed to great heat and suffering on board ship ; they were taken ashore, put into trucks in which cattle infected with the same disease had recently travelled (hear, hear), and thus, both on shipboard and in these trucks, at fairs and other places of sale, the disease was necessarily propagated. It therefore seemed necessary to consider what provisions could be made to diminish the propagation of the disease from the.se causes. He need not go into details as to other diseases — the foot and mouth disease, the scab in sheep, and measles in pigs. He had stated the number of deaths arising from disease, but that did not represent the whole extent of the mischief. There was another point of great social importance connected with this subject, and that was the question of meat. Within the last few years the price of beef and mutton had very considerably increased. Whether that was owing in any considerable extent to the amount of disease which prevailed among cattle, or whether it arose from the greater demand for butcher’s meat in consequence of the increasing prosperity and wealth of the people, lie could not undertake to decide. Probably the rise in price was attributable to both causes. An enormous mass of diseased meat, in various stages of disease, was annually sold. What the precise quantity was, it would of course be difficult to estimate. Professor Gamgee estimated it at one-fifth. There was no conclusive evidence on the subject, although there was ample evidence that the quantities were very large, not only of meat killed while cattle were diseased, but of cattle which had died without the aid of the butcher. He took the case where the figures were beyond dispute. The deaths in dairies were most numerous. In Edinburgh, Professor Gamgee gave returns from 88 dairies for the year ending 1862. Out of 1,839 cows kept, 1,075 were sold diseased, of which 791 were sold to butchers, and 284 to be consumed by pigs. In nine dairies in Dublin, on an average of twenty years, out of 315 cows 161 were sold diseased. In Dublin it was observable that cows being turned out to grass the greatest part of the year were healthier than in the great towns. The loss in London, Manchester, etc., was equally great. These diseased cows were sold in Dublin fairs at from £2 to £5 each. In London and Edinburgh, where the facilities for sale were greater, at from £10 to £20. In London, the seizures of diseased meat were very large, representing probably but a small part of those killed in a diseased state. He would, on this sub INTRODUCTION.