152 DISEASES OF CATTLE. 



l^iiriilent flow until the animal comes in heat, is liable to fail of 

 conception. Any such discharge should be first arrested by repeated 

 injections as for leucorrhea, after which the male be admitted. 



Feeding on a veiy saccharine diet, which greatly favors the deposi- 

 tion of fat, seems to have an even more direct effect in preventing 

 conception during such regimen. Among other causes of barrenness 

 are all those that favor abortion, ergoted grasses, smutty wheat or 

 corn, laxative or diuretic drinking water, and any improper or 

 musty feed that causes indigestions, colics, and diseases of the urinary 

 organs, notably gravel; also savin, rue, cantharides, and all other 

 irritants of the bowels or kidneys. 



Hermaphrodites are barren, of course, as their sexual organs are 

 not distinctively either male or female. The heifer born as a twin 

 with a bull is usually hermaphrodite and barren. But the animals 

 of either sex in which development of the organs is arrested before 

 they are fully matured remain as in the male or female prior to 

 puberty, and are barren. Bulls with both testicles retained within 

 the abdomen may go through the form of serving a cow, but the 

 service is unfruitful; the spermatozoa are not fully elaborated. So 

 I have examined a heifer with a properly formed but very small 

 womb and an extremely narrow vagina and vulva, the walls of which 

 were very muscular, that could never be made to conceive. A post- 

 mortem examination would probably have disclosed an imperfectly 

 formed ovary incapable of bringing ova to maturity. 



A bull and cow that have been too closely inbred in the same line 

 for generations may prove sexually incompatible and unable to gen- 

 erate together, though both are abundantly prolific when coupled with 

 animals of other strains of blood. 



Finally a bull may prove unable to get stock, not from any lack of 

 sexual develof)ment, but from disease of other organs (back, loins, 

 hind limbs), which renders him unable to mount with the energy 

 requisite to the perfect service . 



CONGESTIOX AND INFLAMMATION OF THE TESTICLES (ORCHITis). 



This usually results from blows or other direct injuries, but may be 

 the result of excessive service or of the formation of some new growth 

 (tumor) in the gland tissue. The bull moves stiffly, with straddling 

 gait, and the right or left half of the scrotum in which the affected 

 testicle lies is swollen, red, and tender, and the gland is drawn up 

 within the sac and dropped down again at frequent intervals. It 

 may be treated by rest; by 1| pounds Epsom salt given in 4 quarts 

 of water; by a restricted diet of some succulent food; by continued 

 fomentations with warm water by means of sponges or rags sustained 

 by a sling passed around the loins and back between the hind legs. 



