3S MAINE STATE COLLEGE 



DIGESTION EXPERIMENTS. 

 W. H. Jordan. 



The digestion experiments reported herewith show the results of 

 three seasons work in that direction. They have been conducted 

 largely as one means of studying the food value of the corn crop 

 for cattle and because of the number of times the observations have 

 been repeated with reasonabh T uniform results, they furnish to the 

 Maine farmer data that may be considered fairly reliable. It has 

 been deemed better to allow these figures to accumulate until they 

 should constitute a safe basis for general statements, rather than 

 publish them in a disconnected way as obtained. This has been 

 also the more desirable because these trials are chiefly only a part 

 of a general investigation covering several years. 



The animals used have in all instances been sheep. The trials 

 have covered a period of twelve or thirteen days, during the last 

 five of which the faeces have been collected. These experiments 

 have been especially free of mishaps, such as refusal to eat the 

 entire ration, impaired health of the animals, or loss of dung from 

 the collecting bags. 



It is recognized, of course, that certain conditions operate to 

 limit the accuracy and definiteness of digestion trials, such as indi- 

 viduality of animals, irregularity of excretion, the presence in the 

 fasces of metabolic products which are not properly a part of the 

 undigested food residues, and, in general, the present limitations 

 of analytical methods, which do not admit of a satisfactory study 

 of the digestibility of the various individual compounds of feeding 

 stuffs. The first two conditions are overcome largely by averaging 

 results simultaneously obtained with several animals, and it is hoped 

 that future investigations will remove the difficulties caused by the 

 existing lack of knowledge. 



DIGESTIBILITY OF CORN FODDERS. 



The various materials coming from the corn plant which have 

 been made the subject of digestion trials not heretofore reported are 

 as follows : 



CXLVII. Southern Corn Fodder. Whole plant. Crop of 1891. 

 Cut when the corn was immature, the formation of ears not having 



