DISEASES OF SHEEP. 357 



danger. The wound is then sprayed with any sterilizing solution, 

 or dusted with sulphate of iron finely powdered, or witii common 

 sugar, and the animal is set free in a clean floored barn for two 

 days, until all danger of secondary inflammation may have 

 passed. Generally it is quite safe to release the animals in a clean 

 field, if it is not a season when flies would gather on the wounds 

 and blow them. 



At the same time when the young lambs are emasculated they 

 should be docked, if this operation is thought necessary. It is 

 hardly to be considered unless as a safeguard against the possible 

 infection of the wounds by the blow flies, and when the lambs 

 are to be fed on succulent green fodder crops, as rape or turnips, 

 and fouling behind is to be provided for. But if to be docked, 

 the lambs are operated on at the time of emasculating them, and 

 in this simple manner. As they are held under the arm as above 

 described the tail is taken by the left hand fingers, and the skin 

 slipped up to the rump, the tail is then clipped off at the intended 

 spot by the shears, the wound covered with powdered bluestone 

 and the wool drawn over it. 



PARASITES "OF THE SHEEP. SCAB. 



It has been the experience of all shepherds, from time im- 

 memorial, that sheep were, and are, "an unhappy flock." This 

 remark was made by one who possessed several thousand sheep, 

 and in whose writings consisting of poems which will never be 

 neglected or forgotten, while the human race endures, and given 

 to the world two thousand years ago he simply expressed what 

 has been the universal result of knowledge in the care of sheep. 

 And doubtless while the causes of the numerous diseases due to 

 attacks by parasites without, and within the sheep, were un- 

 known, the diseases thus produced were as wetl known as tjhey 

 are to-day, that is, in regard to the effects of them, although 

 the special causes of most of them were not understood as we 

 now know them. What "can be more emphatic than this quota- 

 tion rendered from Virgil's third Georgics, in regard to a disease 

 which is even now the, bane and the constant thought of the 

 shepherd, and which causes him untold apprehension and labor 

 to evade: "I command that the sheep be supplied with grass 

 (hay) in soft stables until the leafy summer is restored, and to 

 spread the hard floor with much straw and bundles of fern under 

 them, lest the cold ice may injure the gentle flocks and produce 

 the scab and filthy sores." Moreover those ancient shepherds 

 well understood the practice of smearing the sheep as a preven- 

 tive or cure of~this worst of all the parasites of the flock, al- 

 though the true nature of it was then unknown. Indeed as 

 late as the last century it was not known, but the best informed 

 of the shepherds of that day thought the disease was due to 

 "'suppressed perspiration, and bad keep, dogging and exposure to 

 cold and wet." The scab insect then was declared to be of spon- 

 taneous origin, and the existence of the pestiferous insect was 

 never understood as we now know it. 



