EXPERIMENTS IN FEEDING. 41 



cattle are put to pasture iu the spring, if they can find an old 

 bone in the field, they will go to work and gnaw it. That 

 seemed to me to indicate that phosphates, in some form, were 

 needed by our animals to enable them to grow bone, and it 

 seemed to me that as there was a large amount of phosphates 

 in the milk and bone, they must require phosphates in some 

 form or other. Therefore I tried, some years ago, to demon- 

 strate that point to my own satisfaction by giving my cows 

 ground bone ; but if ground bone were given them with all the 

 animal matter in it, it was repulsive to the animals, and it was 

 difficult to make them eat it. If you give them burnt bones, 

 you get the bones in a fine powder, and it is a very good way 

 to give it ; but I thought I discovered a better way by burning 

 bone in the same way that you would burn wood to make 

 charcoal. When burned in that way, it contains all the phos- 

 phate of lime ; and while giving that to my cows, I estimated 

 the quantity which they would require per day, and I think it 

 was two and one-half ounces. I gave it to one of my cows, and 

 she immediately began to decrease in milk. The difference 

 was quite marked. Now, it is well known that clover con- 

 tains a larger amount of phosphate than the grasses, and it 

 strikes me if the gentleman's cows decreased in milk, it must 

 have been on account of the amount of phosphate in the clo- 

 ver; that is my impression, without much reflection. 



I have tried another thing to increase the quantity of milk 

 that the phosphate of lime decreased. I gave one of my cows, 

 with the phosphate, a pound of molasses a day. The increase 

 in the quantity of milk was slight, but it increased it about 

 what the other cow, which had only the bone, fell ofi", making 

 it just about an average between the two. I tried another 

 experiment. One cow was fed with molasses and this bone 

 charcoal ; another was fed the molasses alone. From October 

 10th to October 20th, the cows having ample pasturage all the 

 time, the cow fed on molasses and bone charcoal gained three 

 pounds of milk, the cow fed with one pint of molasses per clay, 

 with her usual food, gained five pounds of milk. A third 

 cow, going to pasture and haying the usual food, gave eigh- 

 teen pounds of milk, which was increased one pound during 

 that time. I then changed the feed, and gave the one that 

 had molasses alone, molasses and bone charcoal. The one 



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