THE DISEASES OF CATTLE. 377 



poor appetite. Cattle are benefited about as much by taking 

 salt, as men are by taking tea, coffee, liquor, tobacco, opium, 

 spices, and salt — one and all causing temporary excitement 

 and permanent debility, disease and premature death. The 

 use of salt can be defended only on allopathic principles, which 

 require one to be stimulated with poison so long as life shall 

 last, always increasing the stimulant, poison, according to the 

 sluggishness of the system. If this will not cause premature 

 death, we know not what can. 



" Nothing can be more unnatural than to mix poison with 

 food, and yet nothing is more common." 



The writer probably proposes to furnish, in the form of 

 ^^ Simon pure" a universal panacea for the cure of all dis- 

 eases. Water is unquestionably one of the indispensables in 

 the treatment of various forms of disease ; but, that it is indi- 

 cated in every form, I do most emphatically deny ; and I 

 consider the promulgation of such a theory as fatal to the 

 success of hydropathy. The writer is down on drug-doctors, 

 butchers, bakers, and, in fact, every other individual in any 

 way engaged in catering for the wants of the " inner man." 

 According to his mode of reasoning, about every thing a man 

 eats is poison. He informs us that " salt is the most injurious 

 poison in common use." This is just what a wiseacre of a 

 physician once affirmed of tea, in the presence of an aged lady 

 who had drank it all her lifetime. She observed that it was a 

 *' very slow poison ; for she had partaken of it for ninety-nine 

 years, and now could play rough and tumble with him, without 

 asking * odds.* " I do not understand what the writer's de- 

 finitions of poisons are ; but when he undertakes to show that 

 salt is poisonous, and operates injuriously on a class of animals 

 that come under the especial jurisdiction of veterinary science, 

 I, as one of its votaries, enter my protest against unsupported 

 facts. 



Mr. Morton, the author of a valuable text book on " Phar- 

 macy," lecturer on Veterinary Materia Medica, at the " Royal 

 Veterinary College," speaks of salt as one of the bounties of 

 creation. "The diffusion of so valuable, indeed indispensable, 

 32* 



