2\\ 



DISEASES OF SHEEP. 



any excess of moisture is peculiarly injurious to the 

 economy of a plant. 



When plants by heat and moisture are stimulated to 

 increased exertion on a poor soil, they acquire bulk 

 without having it in their power to obtain at the same 

 time those saline matters which constitute a healthy 

 plant, becoming in fact, to the eye of an inexperienced 

 person, thriving vegetables, while to the palate they 

 prove wersh and watery. 



The same result may follow from a different process. 

 The saline matter may not be taken up, even when the 

 soil is rich in such ingredients, from the functional de- 

 rangement into which the roots or digestive organs 

 have been thrown by the unnatural circumstances in 

 which it has been placed. A plant is composed, like 

 all organized bodies, of a certain number of proximate 

 principles, which are more or less numerous in different 

 kinds. These are combined with varying quantities of 

 potass, soda, lime, magnesia, and iron, which, though 

 formerly supposed to be too trifling in quantity mate- 

 rially to affect the quality of the plant, have yet been 

 recently and satisfactorily proved completely to change 

 the character of the compound, even when the excess 

 or deficiency amounts only to a T^y^ryiyt'^ part, so that, 

 supposing an animal to thrive on plants which contain 

 salts of any or all of the above bodies, it will soon fall 

 off if these plants are in any way deprived of a single 

 adjunct ; for by the removal of that one salt, their na- 

 ture has been entirely altered. 



The certainty and rapidity with which Bakewell 

 could rot his sheep, by pasturing them, in Autumn, oo 

 land over which water had been allowed to flow during 



