382 FEEDING ANIMALS. 



other in abundance of albuminous elements ; and both are 

 deficient in starch, etc. He tried the experiment of sub- 

 stituting a bushel of beans and a bushel of bran for two 

 bushels of oats, but he soon found that the horses did not 

 do so well on this diet. 



This is the substance of his explanation. It appears 

 evident that he did not quite see that the bean-and-bran 

 ration lacked husk or woody fibre to make a proportional 

 bulk to the nutriment contained. Oats contain as much 

 bulk of fibre as of concentrated meal when ground, and 

 therefore, when masticated, the food goes into the stomach 

 in a light, porous condition, and the gastric fluid can pass 

 freely through it and act upon every part at once, while 

 the bean-meal and bran would form a more compact mass, 

 and the gastric fluid could not so completely act upon it, 

 and the result is the inflammatory swellings which he 

 mentions. The result was not caused by the defective 

 nutrition contained in the food, but from its compact 

 nature. The horse's digestive organs are adapted to a 

 larger proportion of concentrated food than those of the 

 ox, but cannot be healthy upon concentrated food alone. 

 In a state of nature the horse is nourished upon the 

 grasses, and it must have a proportion (at least one-half in 

 bulk) of fibrous food; and this fibrous food must be 

 mingled with the concentrated, so as to render the food as 

 it goes into the stomach porous. This is the significance 

 of bulk in food. It is quite true that the horse must have 

 a ration well balanced in all the constituents required to 

 keep up animal heat and to supply the natural waste of the 

 system, but this ration must also be so made up, mechani- 

 cally, that the digesting fluid can properly act upon it. 

 Inattention to this point has been, perhaps, the most 

 fruitful cause of all his ills. In the use of bean-meal as a 

 grain ration, if Dr. Spooner had mixed this bean-meal with 

 three times its bulk of cut hay, all danger from its con- 



