LIVE STOCK breeders' ASSOCIATION. 199 



in places as to bake potatoes in the isolated patches in the clearings. 

 To the great surprise of the survivors of this terrible fire there sprang 

 up on the naked ground the next spring a great profusion of forms of 

 plant life not common to the district before the fire. Poplars, giant 

 willow herbs, raspberries, black and red, and blackberries sprang up, 

 forming an almost impassable jungle on the drier lands; while cat- 

 tails in the greatest profusion took possession of the swamps where 

 they had not been known before. Of course in the years before the fire 

 the winds and the birds had sowed and kept sowing the woods and the 

 swamps with the seeds which lay there dormant biding the time when 

 a favorable opportunity should offer for them to spring into full pos- 

 session of the soil. This came with the fire which swept the forest 

 away. And so it is with us and with our domestic animals. Anything 

 which weakens the normal vigor of any organ of the body tends to 

 make of that organ, if I may be permitted the figure, a burned over 

 district in the tissues of the body forest in which disease germs, perhaps 

 already planted, tend to spring into mastery, bringing sickness and per- 

 haps disaster. And so, beyond a shadow of doubt, inadequate stable 

 ventilation is one of the strong predisposing causes to tuberculosis, 

 tending to give the germs, ever about us, an opportunity to spring into 

 overmastering growth in some organ of the body. 



BODILY COMFORT OF STOCK MEANS ECONOMY OF FOOD AND INCREASED 



PRODUCTIVE POWER. 



"Recent physiological researches conducted at Cambridge, England, 

 throw new Hght upon the functions of sleep and undisturbed rest; 

 of perfect mental and physical quiet in giving the body renewed power 

 to do. In a study of the causes which influence the blood pressure it 

 was found that during perfect sleep and times which permit the most 

 complete rest, physical and mental, the blood pressure reaches its lowest 

 limit. It is believed that this lowering of the blood pressure re- 

 sults from a pouring out of the circulatory system upon the tissues 

 which need to be nourished the nutritious portions of the blood, so that 

 they are thereby bathed in it and fed. Any thing which disturbs the 

 animal mentally or physically increases the blood pressure, it is held, 

 by withdrawing again from about the tissues into the blood vessels the 

 fluids which nourish them. It is held further that anything which increases 

 the activity of organs or causes excitement or produces a condition of 

 unrest tends to lessen the tendency to pour the nourishing fluids out 

 upon the tissues so that a slower rate of building or replenishing of 

 waste must then take place. If these observations and conclusions are 

 correct then it follows that a comfortably warm, well ventilated stable, 



