178 GENERAL TREATMENT OF HORSES. 



are sufficient to produce them, by a sudden constric- 

 tion of the pores, opened as they have been by the 

 effect of a hot sun during the day. " Heat and 

 cold, moisture and dryness," says Mr. Percival, in 

 his last work on the Horse, when treating on the 

 theory of inflammation, " all in their turn become 

 excitants of inflammation ; their mischievous agency 

 residing more in the vicissitudes from one state to 

 its opposite, than in any obnoxiousness in our cli- 

 mate, from their excess or continuance. They may 

 operate either directly as excitants, or indirectly, 

 simply as predisposing causes." Few veterinarians, 

 indeed, as Mr. Percival expresses himself, now-a- 

 days, feel inclined to deny the uncongeniality of 

 cold and wet to the constitutions of horses, or to 

 maintain, that they do not very often, in such 

 situations, contract the foundations for disease, 

 which, at some future time, is apt to break out, 

 and prove fatal to them. Nor are the remarks of 

 this scientific practitioner and most perspicuous 

 writer, less to our purpose, when speaking of the 

 horse that is turned out of his stable in the winter. 

 " Take a horse," says he, in his chapter on ' Hide- 

 bound,' " fat and sleek in condition, out of a warm 

 stable, where he has been well clothed and fed, 

 turn him, during the cold and wet of winter into a 

 straw-yard, and go and look at him three months 

 afterwards, and you will hardly recognise your own 

 horse. You will find him with a long, shaggy, 

 staring coat ; a belly double the size it was when 

 in condition ; and a skin sticking close and fast to 

 his ribs, which may now be readily counted with 



