DISEASES PECULIAR TO BREEDING STOCK. 305 



The sympathy between the skin and the bowels is of the 

 most intimate kind, and in earliest youth, when the suscep- 

 tibility of the bowels is so great, the chilling of the surface 

 often leads to disastrous congestions of the bowels and fatal 

 scouring. 



Similar to the above is exposure to cold rain storms. A 

 passing shower may do no harm, even if cold; but a pro- 

 longed exposure to rain, with a low temperature, is terribly 

 trying to the system of the new-born foal, and often lead? to 

 disorders of the digestive organs, with persistent and fatal 

 diarrhoea. 



Only two more conditions may be referred to, and both 

 are connected with -a more advanced period of colthood than 

 are those already mentioned. When the foal begins to feed 

 he may suffer from all those conditions of the food that prove 

 noxious through the milk of the mother. A feed, for exam- 

 ple, of a too stimulating grain, or of a too rank and aqueous 

 grass, of fodder that has been badly harvested and rendered 

 musty or bleached and fibrous, of grain or hay that has been 

 altered by ergot or smut, and of roots and tubers that have 

 been frosted or diseased these and others may at times give 

 rise to irritation in the as yet comparatively inhabituated 

 stomach, and scouring is a not distant consequence. 



The second evil result of faulty food and water is the 

 presence of worms in the intestines. All the round worms 

 of the intestines of the horse can live in water and moist 

 earth, or in fresh vegetation, in their early and immature 

 condition. Thus they are liable to be taken in continually 

 with the food and water, and developing in the intestines 

 they lay eggs almost without limit as to numbers, to be 

 hatched and sped on the same noxious course. Hence it is 

 that in pastures that have been grazed by horses year after 

 year, and with drinking ponds and shallow wells into which 

 the washings of the surface can find their way, the colts are 

 particularly liable to worms; and diarrhoea from this cause 

 is by no means infrequent. In such a case there is the gen- 

 eral unthrifty appearance of the wormy animal, and the 

 rubbed, frizzled appearance of the hair at the root of the tail 

 which bespeaks the itching of the anus. The most marked 



