Mr. Edmund Tattersall, the great repudiator of what he called
the " spontaneous-nonsense" theory of Rinderpest, and advocate of the policy of extermination for cattle, has given us a very in- structive lesson this week as to the limits of spontaneous nonsense, -how salutary a teacher self-interest sometimes is. He discovered, or thought he had discovered—for Mr. Edmund Tattersall is hasty with his facts, which are rather too ' spontaneously' evolved, —that the Rinderpest had extended to horses, on which he wrote in a great hurry to the Times to advise giving arsenic in small doses, on the authority of a medical friend, and not exterminating them. Indeed if Rinderpest had broken out at Tattersall's, the cost of following his own stern advice might have been alarming, and might have quite outweighed the comfort of logical con- sistency. Of course Mr. Tattersall takes a distinction. " I ad- vocated killing all the cattle in an infected district because no one seemed able to cure them, and they could be eaten. We have not yet taken to eating our horses." Is that quite candid in Mr. Tattersall ? He advocated declaring a whole district infected, and destroying all cattle, whether sound or unsound, within it. Could we have eaten all the cattle of a district before the meat got bad in that hot September weather ? Is not the true difference rather this,—that a great horse-dealer can more easily generate "spon- taneous nonsense" with regard to those animals in which he does not deal, than those in which he does ?
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