The cattle and the plants seem to have succeeded to
the human liability to plague. At the present moment, the vine and the potato in Europe are both suffering from a terrible disease, while the plague has re-appeared in one English district, and the foot- and-mouth disease—hardly lees annoying, though less dangerous— is spread widely in another. It is said that the yield of grapes in Portugal will be almost nil, will be at least one twenty-fifth of its normal yield, owing to the attacks of that dreadful little insect, the phylloxera vastatrix, upon the Portuguese vines. A remedy proposed for this last disease is to sprinkle the vines with oil of garlic,—of which in Portugal, by all accounts, there must be a sufficient supply. With regard to the potato disease, a gentleman writes to the Times that he has found a most effective remedy in soot, which is certainly quite as appropriate to Entrland as oil of garlic to Portugal. Perhaps, after all, it may be found that our- cattle and vegetables so far assimilate their conditions to that of the human beings near them, as to suffer for want of some of the very elements in which we indulge most liberally ourselves.
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