Diseases of the Digestive Organs. 3 



ting bogged, and where they may draw in with the tongue a full 

 mouthful of coarse herbage which they swallow with little masti- 

 cation or admixture with saliva. This lodges in the first two 

 stomachs, and if, from any cause, rumination is impaired, or sus- 

 pended, it finds itself in conditions especially favorable to fer- 

 mentation. The food too, as in the case of frosted roots, wet 

 clover or partially ripened grain, etc. , is often charged with fer- 

 ments (bacteria) in a state of great vital activity, and hence the 

 frequent tympanies of the ox. The ruminant is no less liable 

 than the soliped to overload the stomach, and though the return 

 of food from the first two stomachs to the mouth is a normal pro- 

 cess, this is promptly arrested by the supervention of paresis in 

 . the overloaded and overdistended organs. This overdistension 

 further tensely stretches and closes the lips of the oesophagean 

 opening. The rapid swallowing of the food, with only one or 

 two strokes of the teeth for each morsel, renders the large 

 ruminant more liable to take in poisons, pins, nails and other 

 injurious bodies, especially when hunger and the blunting of the 

 sense of smell have been brought on by traveling on dusty roads. 

 Again the large ruminants, cows especially, are wont to while 

 away the tedious hours by chewing and unwittingly swallowing 

 pieces of leather, cloth, bones, iron, etc. Once more the third 

 stomach in which the food is compressed and triturated between 

 the multiple folds, is normally comparatively dry, and is liable 

 under dry, fibrous, heating or stimulating aliment, or in case of 

 fever, to dry up in part or in whole, and to derange the whole 

 process of digestion. 



All herbivora are liable to disease from unwholesome fodder 

 and the resulting affection may prove epizootic in connection with 

 unfavorable seasons, or more local, from faulty cultivation. 



The symptoms vary so much in connection with the seat and 

 nature of the disease that it would be impolitic to attempt to 

 generalize them. 



