THE FEEDING AND MANAGEMENT OF CATTLE. 441 



Cattle Feeding." The leading features of this system have also been 

 given in some of the reports of our American experiment stations. 

 Being largely the result of German investigations and formulations, it 

 is naturally spoken of as the "German system," while the tables of 

 data relative to feeding stuffs and feeding rations are usually spoken 

 of as the German feeding tables or the tables of Kuehn or Wolff, as 

 compiled and arranged by those writers. 



Table I of this chapter presents the studies of chemists both in this 

 country and abroad, summarized and placed in the most available con- 

 densed form. The figures giving the composition of fodders are in most 

 cases taken from the compilation of analyses of American fodders by 

 Dr. E. H. Jenkins and A. L. Winton, jr., first published in Volume II 

 of the Experiment Station Record, Department of Agriculture (pp. 

 702-709). That portion of the table which gives the digestible constit- 

 uents was derived from the first part of the table through coefficients 

 of digestibility given by Dr. Jenkins in the Report of the Connecticut 

 Experiment Station for 1886 or from later sources. 



There was a time when farmers thought that science, and even agri- 

 cultural science, could bring little that would be helpful to them, but 

 happily that day is past, and I approach the scientific side of the sub- 

 ject of feeding with no fear whatever that it will prove uninteresting 

 to my readers, but rather that a large majority will gladly avail them- 

 selves of any opportunity which may offer for a better understanding 

 of the great problem of stock feeding. It will be remembered in study- 

 ing the table that like most first attempts at definite expression of diffi- 

 cult and complex problems, what is here given is but a crude expres- 

 sion of important laws, and that the tables will no doubt be consider- 

 ably modified or perhaps supplanted in time by better ones, when the 

 animal physiologist has enlarged our knowledge of what becomes of 

 plant constituents in the animal body. In its present form it contains 

 so much of value that it will well repay all the study and time devoted 

 to it. 



WHAT THE TABLK SHOWS. 



This table looks formidable enough, but when we have studied it, 

 column by column, I do not think it will be regarded as difficult, nor 

 will its contents seem dry to farmer readers. In the first column are 

 given the names of fodders, all of which are used in some portion of 

 the country for stock-feeding purposes; next to this comes a statement 

 of the number of analyses from which the succeeding average figures 

 are derived. 



Water. In the laboratory the scales of the chemist are so delicate 

 that he can weigh a thimbleful of corn meal with a smaller proportional 

 error than the farmer weighs a wngon load of corn. In a small dish 

 on these scales he places a sample of the fodder with which he is to 

 \vork and determines its weight. Placing this in an oven it is dried at 

 a temperature of 212 F. for several hours and weighed again. The 



