FOOD AND GENERAL TREATMENT. 417 



down ; but by constantly standing, an obstinate, if not in- 

 curable, disease sets up — ^spavin, ring-bone, or the like. 



One of the first questions in practical importance, to be 

 considered in the erection of a stable, is 



LIGHT. 



Light is essential to the growth and development of every 

 object in the world that has existence in an organized form. 

 Life of no kind, whether animal or vegetable, can prosper 

 without it. The tiniest ^pear of grass must have light, or it 

 loses its color and substance ; and the same law is true, with- 

 out variation, throughout all the higher types of organism 

 in the animal and vegetable kingdoms alike. 



The importance of light to the material world can hardly 

 be conceived. "Without light there could be no he'at, so that 

 our world, under that deprivation, would not only be in per- 

 petual darkness blacker than midnight, but it would be a 

 frozen chaos. Light is the stimulating agent that causes 

 every thing upon the earth's surface to bud and spring 

 forth, clothing the valleys with verdure, the plains with 

 waving fields and ripening orchards, the hill-sides with tow- 

 ering forests, and making the whole face of Mature a pano- 

 rama of unceasing, yet ever-changing, beauty and gladness.. 

 Life is dependent upon it no less for preservation than for 

 creation and development. Nothing can continue to live 

 without it; and while it is true that animals and plants can. 

 not live upon it, it is equally true that they can not live with- 

 out it. All living creatures — the whole of animated Nature — 

 should be permitted to enjoy it freely at such times as the^ 

 beneficent Creator has arranged to furnish it to the world.. 

 To deprive any animal of light will be to materially injure 

 it, and prove the occasion of disease, if not of death. 



What, then, must be the condition of that horse whom the 

 ignorance, the heedlessness, or the parsimony of his owner 

 condemns to dreary confinement, for a great part of his time,, 

 in a dark, close stable? How can the effect be otherwise than 

 highly detrimental ? Such we always find it to be. To say 

 27 



