THEIR FEED AND THEIR FEET. 55 



his horse; thus doing precisely the wrong thing. 

 The sores may thus be cured, but not the disease. 

 How almost surely a cure results when the animal is 

 by some fortunate circumstance put to steady serv- 

 ice. Such animals are unsound throughout ; their 

 tissues are formed from impure blood, the product 

 of indigestion. They eat, but not " in the sweat of 

 their brows" — and it takes a good deal of sweat (or 

 rather work, for the more one works, the less easily 

 he sweats) to prevent disease if "a good deal of 

 food " is eaten. It is quite possible for a horse to 

 become sore-backed from overwork — either relative 

 or positive overwork ; that is, where the work is ex- 

 tremely hard or the diet absolutely deficient. In 

 the first instance the creature, working beyond his 

 strength, so exhausts his reserve force, that he has 

 not sufficient vitality to digest his food ; hence he 

 suffers from indigestion and impure blood, the same 

 as the horse of leisure who eats to excess. A starva- 

 tion diet accomplishes the same thing, finally, only 

 in a different way; the system being under-nour- 

 ished from lack of food instead of any fault with the 

 digestive organs. It might be said that in such cases 

 the digestive organs become weak and disordered as 

 well as the general muscular system ; but the 



TANNER EXPERIMENT PROVED 



that after an extended fast there was practically no 

 limit to the capacity of the digestive organs until 

 reparation had been made for the forty days' canni- 

 balism. He ate every two or three hours ; gainin? 



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