Preventive Pathology 127 



tion is unusually severe weather or a case of indis- 

 position. Serious illness we never have unless 

 when I make the mistake of assuming a conscience in 

 a man and trusting him to earn his wages honestly. 

 I do not believe that uniformly rich pasture is 

 the best pasture for calves. They often prefer a 

 bite of something which seems better adapted to 

 the discipline of the stomach, as if for the reason 

 that we take cheese to finish a good dinner. Their 

 normal taste in differential botany cannot be 

 without significance in the physiological scheme, 

 and I am prepared to learn even from sucklings. 

 One thing suggested to me by their sagacity of 

 palate is that the growing stomach, unlike the 

 matured one, has a dual function ; first, to digest 

 food and to assimilate nutrition ; second, to 

 develop the sound strength of the stomach itself, 

 which may be the sounder and the stronger for 

 acting on a percentage of herbal substances poorer 

 in food and harder to digest. There are times in 

 the twenty-four hours when calves, in the pink of 

 health, will prefer a bunch of heather to the best 

 clovers and grasses in the country. One must 

 guard against generalising from the individual 

 vagaries of a diseased appetite, but one cannot 

 ignore the uniform evidence of a hundred healthy 

 stomachs. Should the expert deny my inference, 

 I can quote to him the selective talent of the calf, 

 informed by an intimacy of experience to which 

 neither the expert nor I can pretend. The feeding 

 needs of the young calf must be very different from 

 those of the fattening adult. 



