A SHEEP PLAGUE.

Thames Star, Volume XI, Issue 3580, 17 June 1880, Page 2

A SHEEP PLAGUE.

One of the blessings claimed for our modern civilisation has been the extra* ordinary increase to our facilities of intercommunication. But this may prove an evil too, at times. As a direct conseqaence comes the rapid dissemination of epidemics, against some of which, more* - over, no quarantine or Privy Council regulations are of the slightest avail. Ease in postal communication is an enormous boon, no doubt, yet the Colorado , beetle came to England in a letter. j There is no evidence, at present, to show how the phylloxera travelled to the Antipodes, but it is as likely as not that the movements of that fatally destructive insect may have been facilitated by the existence of several fine line of passenger steamers between the old and new worlds. There seams no reason why the last scourge by which our much enduring English farme;* is afflicted, should ever reach Australia, yet there is, unhappily, no cer.'ainly that the "fluke," another mysterious and lethal insect, will not some day appear to prey upon''the livers of Australian sheep. The ravages it has committed in English flocks, particularly in Western counties, have been terrible. What it is exactly no one knows, nor where it comes from, but it has been described as " a living thing, the shape of a sole, about half an inch in length, of a dark brown color, appa- . rently without nerves, legs, eyes, or sex. This thine; finds its way through the stomach, and fastens itself by a sucker in the liver of a sheep." Here it lays eggs, in numbers varying, according to various authorities, from a couple of thousand to forty thousand or more, each of which, by.a rapid process, developei into an embryo fluke, to be in its turn the progenitor of thousands of others. No < wonder that, within a short lime, whole flocks of sheep have been, destroyed by these destructive parasites. Australian shepherds will do well to beware of them.—Home News.