9 
Pure and Mixed Linseed- Cakes. 
Such cakes, although apparently cheap, in reality are dear at 
the price at which they are sold, and less economical than the 
more expensive and more nutritious pure linseed-cake. 
Makers of pure linseed-cake cannot afford to pay so high a 
commission to their agents, or to country dealers, as the crushers 
who incorporate with their cakes rice-dust, pollard, oat-dust, and 
other cheap materials of questionable feeding value. Thus 
it happens that the sale of inferior and occasionally downright 
bad and unwholesome feeding-cakes is encouraged to the mani- 
fest disadvantage of the stockfeeder. There are, of course, ex- 
ceptions to the prevailing inclination of many to buy cheap 
cakes. In the neighbourhood of Gainsborough, for instance, 
pure linseed-cake finds a ready sale, and the frequenter of 
Gainsborough market, and several other agricultural centres in 
Lincolnshire and in Norfolk, has the choice between at least half 
a dozen equally good pure linseed-cakes of rival makers. 
Amongst the numerous samples which have passed through 
my hands, I found some cakes unmistakeably poisonous, others 
of a doubtful character, and a great many, considering their low 
feeding value, far too dear at the price at which they were 
bought. 
Few feeding-cakes contain ingredients so positively poisonous 
as to render the cake unfit as food for sheep or cattle. In 
most cases, cakes reported to have done mischief to stock, I 
find do not contain poisonous matters capable of being isolated 
by chemical analysis or by the microscope. Of late years, instances 
of death or injury to stock supposed to have been caused by the 
cake upon which the animals were fed, have been again and again 
brought under my notice, and in several cases the circumstances 
under which the animals died strongly pointed out the cake as the 
most likely cause of their death. Considering the large number 
of suspected cakes that have been referred to me for examination, 
I have come to the conclusion that the deleterious character of 
some cakes cannot be recognised by any known chemical test, 
and is only recognisable in the disastrous effects which they 
produce on the animal system. It may be a coincidence, but it 
is nevertheless a remarkable fact, that, to my recollection, in 
almost all cases in which I had to examine cakes for poisonous 
ingredients, mixed or compound feeding-cakes were sent to me 
to report upon. Whilst I can refer to dozens of cases in which 
inferior linseed-cakes, or specially prepared compound feeding- 
cakes, were reported to me as having done serious injury to stock, 
I do not recollect more than one or two instances in which pure 
linseed-cake was supposed to have been injurious to the health 
of the animals to whom it was given. 
