2 2 THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 



many pastures, and are believed to cause copious salavation when 

 eaten by equines, though the same effects are also attributed by 

 some to the fondness for eating the blossoms of white clover, which 

 horses evince, and the ripening seeds of which plant are thought to 

 cause working farm teams to lose flesh in the latter summer 

 months. An acquaintance near here thinks that the eating of the 

 above nauseous herbs, and also the bitter sumach, is — as an item in 

 natural pharmacy — as a prophyllactic for " bots," which are believed 

 to be an insidious and frequently a fatal foe to the equine genus of 

 farm animals ; and another rural philanthropist, whose name one 

 could mention, used to aver that tobacco juice was the proper and 

 efficient destroyer of the typhoid bacillus, and he earnestly and 

 persistently advised his rural confreres, at times of typhoid preva- 

 lence, to take abundant and frequent " chaws " of " Myrtle Navy " 

 or other brands of the opiate weed, and, as was popularly believed, 

 with beneficial results to such as could bear up against the heroic 

 remedy. 



This episode had a date before the era of pasteurism, or at 

 least before those notions had obtained notoriety. The tobacco 

 quack had a rough philosophical notion of the microbe-in-the-blood 

 source of typhus, and of the serum method of treatment, and had 

 unshaken faith in his method of immism, akin to the homcepathists 

 combating evil by a lesser ill, or, as the politicians sometimes say, 

 " fighting the devil with fire," that is, " outlying the liars." 



Many farmers are made aware by experience that young lambs, 

 and those, too, in a very thriving condition and fit for the butcher, 

 are infested with tapeworms in the smaller intestines ; said parasites 

 do not seem detrimental for a time to the lambs' health, which are 

 often in a state of extreme fatness, but about weaning time show a 

 strong propensity to take bites of bitter shrubs, such as the wild 

 cherry and sumach. This habit occasionally causes the death of the 

 lamb from inflammation of the throat and salivary glands, ending 

 in much swelling of the throat, and gangrene. 



A rural Burford cowleech relied on logical analogies, and in his 

 treatment of a sick cow or ox, cases of what he termed " embargo in 

 the maniplus," recommended to give a dose of half a pound of gun- 

 powder in water solution. Sometimes the cure threatened by exag- 

 geration worse dangers than the malady had done. 



