390 THE DISEASES AND DISORDERS OF THE OX. 



been embalmed witb costly salves and balsams, and smell 

 strongly of myrrh, aloes, and other fragrant things. The learned 

 doctors of France, Germany, and Italy, all made use of this 

 eccentric drug, and in the seventeenth century it was found that 

 for true mummies men substituted bodies which had died of 

 contagious diseases. These latter were so prepared with different 

 substances as to pass for the real article demanded. Well may 

 one exclaim " Truth is indeed far stranger than fiction ! " 



It would, we should imagine, be generally conceded that 

 enlightenment among the general public regarding the diseases 

 of man, and their nature, and the remedies of true value in their 

 treatment, is now considerably more in the ascendency than in 

 the case of animals. We may, perhaps, admit that superstitions 

 are as rife regarding human diseases as regarding the diseases of 

 oxen, horses, and sheep ; but any real knowledge of the latter 

 among the general public is of the most elementary, and but too 

 often most erroneous description. We may give an example. 

 There is, according to the rural population, a disease of cattle 

 called the tail worm, also spoken of as the *' wolf." It is 

 believed to be discoverable by a softness between some of the 

 joints of the tail. In these cases it is supposed to be necessary 

 to slit open the under surface of the tail, and to rub in a mixture 

 composed of salt, woodsoot, and garlic. Although there is no 

 such disease as tail worm, many well educated farmers and 

 others, strange though it may appear, also believe in the actual 

 existence of the tail worm, and in the necessity for these ill- 

 devised practices. 



How many poor cows have their tails slit open in one day in 

 our rural districts it is impossible to say ; and even if they escape 

 this indignity, to what others they may not be subjected is a 

 matter of conjecture only. Might we not have expected that 

 scientific enlightenment would have done more, would have 

 opened men's minds to a greater extent than it seems as yet to 

 have done ? In one little straggling village alone, in North 

 Lincolnshire, there are three men who practise the ox-healing 

 art ; and though no one is qualified, yet they vie with one another 

 in declamations of each other's incapacity. One wonders how 

 men could ever have been led to believe in carbonised python, 

 or in the mummified remains perhaps a thousand or more years 

 old, as specifics against human ills. But is this, we ask, more 



