DISEASES OF THE BONES. 75 i 



mon, a few years ago, to find the horse in the pens which 

 were called such, half-leg deep in mud and water, at mid- 

 winter, and in summer standing upon great steaming piles 

 of manure. He was generally left in the sole charge of care- 

 less negroes, who neither knew, nor cared to know, much 

 ahout his wants or his health; and who, after working the 

 faithful creature hard all day, and abusing him recklessly, 

 thought their duty fully discharged, if at night they shut him 

 up in these pens, to gorge himself from a trough-full of corn 

 and fodder. And the practice was the same, without any re- 

 ference to his condition or his health, whether he was sick 

 or well, or whether overheated by violent exercise or not. 

 E'or did the poor animal's ill-usage always end even with 

 this. Often he was pressed into the service of some pilfering 

 or trading expedition, conducted under cover of night ; rid- 

 den at the top of his speed to the rendezvous ; tied to a tree 

 in the woods, without any protection from the weather, no 

 matter how cold ; and then, in the morning, galloped back, 

 until he was steaming with perspiration, just in time to eat 

 his corn and be driven out to work again. Such was the 

 treatment of thousands of horses at the South fifteen or 

 twenty years ago. Of course, disease did a fearful work 

 among them. 



Succinctly presented, then, the agencies principally con- 

 cerned in producing big head are bad water, improper feed- 

 ing, malarious influences, and general ill-usage. IN'ot all of 

 these, it must be understood, are necessarily in active opera- 

 tion at the same time. Horses have had the disease that 

 were as well cared for as possible, and cases have occurred in 

 sections where the water was good and abounded with lime. 

 But neither horses nor mules, it is believed, ever suflered 

 from big head whose food was not largely made up of corn, 

 and but few in localities entirely free from malaria. 



NATURE AND LOCATION OF THE DISEASE. 



Big head is a disease of the bones, beginning with an en- 

 largement of the bones of the head and jaw, and ending with 



