136 THE NATURE AND TREATMENT OF 



inconvenience to their horses ; but I contend that it acts in- 

 directly in the manner alluded to ; and although some horses 

 may ^^get used to it^^ and others, having wonderful digestive 

 organs, assimilate it, yet the day of reckoning may not be 

 far off. 



I contend that water taken with food, always retards diges- 

 tion. The proper solvents of the food are the gastric fluids, 

 and the cow has abundant facilities for supplying the req- 

 uisite quantity. An ordinary cow is said to secrete (while 

 feeding) fluid, of salivial and gastric characters, at the rate of 

 one gallon per hour, — enough, we should judge, to saturate a 

 common meal, — therefore the water is not needed. I urge no 

 objection against the more rational custom of merely sprinkling 

 the food with salted water, in view of absorbing dust which 

 often abounds in inferior hay; but I seriously object to the 

 above hydropathic method of preparing food. 



From experiments made on the human subject, it has been 

 ascertained that parsnips, carrots, turnips, and cabbage, which 

 contain from 80 to 90 per cent of water, require over twice as 

 much time to digest as solid food does. Cabbage for ex- 

 ample, requires twenty, and broiled beefsteak only eight hours 

 to digest. 



Turn a cow into a luxuriant pasture of grass or clover, and 

 after partaking of one or the other, she is liable to become 

 " blown or hoven " — tympanitic ; the abdomen becomes enor- 

 mously distended with gas (either carbonic acid gas or sulphur- 

 etted hydrogen), and unless the same be condensed or evacu- 

 ated, rupture and death are sure to follow. This imperfect 

 digestion and consequent generation of gas is due to the presence 

 of vegetable fluids found in green fodder. Therefore, animals 

 having weak digestive organs — predisposed to flatulency — 

 should have the privilege of watering their own food with sali- 

 vial fluid. The best diet for such an animal would be " dry 

 feed" composed of ground oats, cracked corn, ^^Jinefeed" and 

 a small quantity of sweet hay. On the other hand, a consti- 

 pated state of the bowels always indicates coarse food ; and in 

 this view the Engli-^h use chopped straw and coarse bran with 



