CHAPTEE XIX, 



Training, Feeding, and Breeding: 

 Or Developing Food- Value in Farm Stock. 



Balfour Stewart, LL. D., says in his treatise on saving 

 force, that "we make use of the animal, not only as a va- 

 riety of nutritious food, but also to enable us indirectly to 

 iitilize those vegetable products, such as grasses, which we 

 could not use directly, with our present digestive organs," 

 and it is substantially correct to say that the leading ob- 

 ject in raising cattle is to produce the best quality, and 

 largest quantity of meat-food, by employing the cattle 

 to organize vegetable structure, or feed, into their own 

 growth. For, neither animals or man can form structure, 

 or growth, except from previously organized structure. 

 Thus, while the structural or organized parts of animals, 

 such as muscle and allied growths, afford us nourishment, 

 and can even be transformed into organized tissue, fat af- 

 fords no direct nourishment, because it is "structureless, un- ' 

 organized matter,"* not capable of forming muscle, or sup- 

 plying structure-forming material. It is important, there- ' 

 fore, to devote our cattle feed to forming such cattle struct' 

 ure or growth as will serve the purpose of really nutritive 

 food, in the form of flesh-meat, when the cattle products 

 come to be consumed as food. And it may again be stat- 

 ed, that only organized structure that has been previously 

 formed by natural growing processes, whether animal or 

 vegetable, can be converted into human growth, or vital 

 structure, or afford nutriment for assimilation. Hence all 

 * Pr, li. S, Beal, in Physi, Anat,, last part, 



