DESCRIPTION OF FEEDING-STUFFS 191 



of straw and wood, in fact rubbish of all sorts, the 

 greater part of which is quite unfit for food. Al- 

 though the broken and worthless grains of the sort 

 which is being cleaned and many of the weed seeds 

 can be quite well used as fodder, there are other 

 seeds which cannot. Some of these, such as ergot, 

 corn cockle, charlock, darnel, yellow rattle, cow 

 wheat and rust spores often cause serious injury by 

 poisoning, and in some cases death has been known 

 to result. Such weed seeds are further to be avoided 

 because they pass into the dung, and are brought 

 again to the field, where they later cause more weeds 

 to grow, or else breed fungi to attack the plants 

 again. 



After the corn has been cleaned, it is heated, 

 the husks and seed coats removed and the grain 

 ground. Only the bran and feeding meals should 

 come into use as feeding-stuffs, but some millers 

 seem to consider that they have the right to add 

 the ground rubbish obtained in the preliminary 

 cleaning, and in extreme cases even buy rubbish 

 for the purpose of adulteration. A list of the 

 materials which have been ground up with bran 

 or feeding meals with the object of deceiving the 

 buyer would be almost interminable, and it is only 

 necessary to ^ntion such substances as sand, 

 clay, lime-dust, chalk, gypsum, marble, mill sweep- 

 ings, stone-nut, olive and date kernels, dried 

 potato pulp, maize stems, millet seed husks, 



