VALUE OF MALT IN FEEDING 261 



As to the grass that grown in sewage was found to be 

 more watery than the unsewaged grass ; hence, of equal weights 

 of green grass, the unsewaged produced the most increase in 

 fattening oxen. But calculated on a basis of equal weights 

 of dry matter, the sewage-irrigated grass -gave the better 

 results. The best returns were, however, obtained when the 

 grass was fed to milking cows ; sewage irrigation was found 

 to increase the amount of milk which could be produced 

 from 1 acre of land three- or four-fold. The herbage of the 

 sewage-irrigated meadows was found to change rapidly ; the 

 Leguminosse disappeared, as did most of the miscellaneous 

 species, while the grasses became restricted to two or three 

 vigorous species, which constituted the whole vegetation, 

 such as rough-stalked meadow grass, couch grass, cocksfoot, 

 Yorkshire fog, and rye grass. 



II. EXPERIMENTS UPON MALT AND BARLEY. 



In 1863, at the request of the Board of Trade, experiments 

 were undertaken to ascertain the relative feeding value of malt 

 and of the barley from which it was made, so as to see if any- 

 thing was gained by the process of malting. It had often been 

 asserted, and was the opinion of many practical graziers, that 

 even if there were some loss in the process of converting barley 

 into malt, yet the superior digestibility of the malt and its 

 action upon the other items of the whole food more than 

 compensated for this loss. 



The investigation was divided into two stages (1) an 

 enquiry into the nature and amount of the losses during the 

 malting process ; (2) a comparison of the food value of the 

 resulting malt and of the original barley. 



Two lots of barley were selected for the experiment, one a 

 malting barley of fair quality, the other a thinner, more nitro- 

 genous barley, such as would only be used for feeding. The 

 malting was done in the ordinary way, at Hertford, and samples 

 of 25 Ib. each were taken of the grain before steeping, when 

 thrown out after steeping, at intervals during growth, and 



