458 VENTILATION. 



approaches. The horse — the agricultural horse especially — acquires a thicker 

 and a lengthened coat, in order to defend him from the surrounding cold. Man 

 puts on an additional and a warmer covering, and his comfort is increased and 

 his health preserved by it. He who knows anything of the farmer's horse, or cares 

 about his enjoyment, will not object to a coat a little longer and a little 

 roughened when the wintry wind blows bleak. The coat, however, needs not to 

 be so long as to be unsightly ; and warm clothing, even in a cool stable, will, 

 with plenty of honest grooming, keep the hair sufficiently smooth and glossy 

 to satisfy the most fastidious. The over-heated air of a close stable saves much 

 of this grooming, and therefore the idle attendant unscrupulously sacrifices the 

 health and safety of the horse. When we have presently to treat of the hair 

 and skin of the horse, this will be placed in a somewhat different point of view. 

 If the stable is close, the air will not only be hot, but foul. The breathing 

 of every animal contaminates it ; and when, in the course of the night, with 

 every aperture stopped, it passes again and again through the lungs, the blood 

 cannot undergo its proper and healthy change ; digestion will not be so perfectly 

 performed, and all the functions of life are injured. Let the owner of a 

 valuable horse think of his passing twenty or twenty-two out of the 

 twenty-four hours in this debilitating atmosphere ! Nature does wonders in 

 enabling every animal to accommodate itself to the situation in which it is 

 placed, and the horse that lives in the stable-oven suffers less from it than 

 would scarcely be conceived possible ; but he does not, and cannot, possess 

 the power and the hardihood which he would acquire under other cir- 

 cumstances. 



The air of the improperly close and heated stable is still farther contaminated 

 by the urine and dung, which rapidly ferment there, and give out stimulating 

 and unwholesome vapours. When a person first enters an ill-managed stable, 

 and especially early in the morning, he is annoyed, not only by the heat of the 

 confined air, but by a pungent smell, resembling hartshorn ; and can he be sur- 

 prised at the inflammation of the eyes, and the chronic cough, and the disease of 

 the lungs, by which the animal, who has been all night shut up in this vitiated 

 atmosphere, is often attacked ; or if glanders and farcy should occasionally 

 break out in such stables ? It has been ascertained by chemical experiment 

 that the urine of the horse contains in it an exceedingly large quantity of 

 hartshorn ; and not only so, but that, influenced by the heat of a crowded stable, 

 and possibly by other decompositions that are going forward at the same time, 

 this ammoniacal vapour begins to be rapidly given out almost immediately 

 after the urine is voided. 



When disease begins to appear amoDg the inhabitants of these ill-ventilated 

 places, is it wonderful that it should rapidly spread among them, and that the 

 plague-spot should be, as it were, placed on the door of such a stable"? When 

 distemper appears in spriug or in autumn, it is in very many cases to be traced 

 to such a pest-house. It is peculiarly fatal there. The horses belonging to a 

 small establishment, and rationally treated, have it comparatively seldom, 

 or have it lightly ; but among the inmates of a crowded stable it is sure to dis- 

 play itself, and there it is most fatal. The experience of every veterinary 

 surgeon, and of every large proprietor of horses, will corroborate this state- 

 ment. Agriculturists should bring to their stables the common sense which 

 directs them in the usual concerns of life, and should begin, when their pleasures 

 and their property are so much at stake, to assume that authority and to enforce 

 that obedience, to the lack of which is to be attributed the greater part of bad 

 stable-management and horse-disease. Of nothing are we more certain than that 

 the majority of the maladies of the horse, and those of the worst and most fatal 



