EARLIEST PUPPYHOOD. 293 



go further and consider the importance of practising this 

 virtue when caring for the feeding-vessels which are used 

 with puppies at the time of weaning and while cow's milk 

 is being given. 



All may not know that under certain conditions there 

 is generated in milk a virulent poison, bearing the name 

 tyrotoxicon, which was first discovered in cheese, and 

 eventually proved to be the active agent in ice-cream 

 poisoning, epidemics of which have been frequent in this 

 country. 



The special influences which develop this poison are 

 heat, foul air and moisture. The first alone is scarcely 

 sufficient, for it does but little more than cause the acid 

 changes or souring, — and, as all know, sour milk is inno- 

 cent of harm, — but when combined with emanations from 

 filth its evil effects are greatly intensified, and these are 

 still further favored by moisture. 



The symptoms of milk poisoning in adults are essentially 

 the same as appear in severe cholera morbus, while in 

 children they are identical with those of cholera infantum ; 

 in fact there is ample reason for the belief that these so- 

 called summer complaints in most instances are, pure and 

 simple, attacks of milk poisoning. Now, while dogs, old 

 and young, are far better able to resist food poisons than 

 members of the human race, such is the nature of tyro- 

 toxicon it is scarcely possible for them to be wholly insen- 

 sible to it. And since diarrhoea of a rapidly depressing 

 and fatal character is by no means infrequent among 

 young puppies in hot weather, it is not at all unreasonable 

 to suppose that they, also, suffer from this poison. 



Assuredly if they are susceptible to milk poisoning the 

 loose methods of many caretakers must do much to make 

 puppies frequent victims of it ; and more than likely the 

 poison is usually generated in the feeding-vessels, which 



