Pure and Mixed Linseed-Cakes. 
49 
■jyiddiness, and vomiting, wliicb only yielded to severe medical 
treatment." 
The preceding observations of Professor Tuson are highly 
interesting, for they throw much light on the injury which 
mouldy or stale oilcakes have frequently been observed to 
produce. Adulterated or mixed linseed-cakes, in particular, are 
apt to cause injury to animals, and if we remember for a moment 
what materials are often employed by the makers of cheap 
adulterated linseed-cakes, or compound feeding-cakes, we can 
only feel sarprised that complaints respecting injury done to 
stock fed upon them are not more numerous. Still, complaints 
of that kind are constantly brought under my notice, and I am 
convinced that many apparently unaccountable losses which 
stock-farmers experience are traceable to the bad condition of the 
cakes on which the animals have been fed. 
Reference has already been made to the death of several 
animals fed upon cake, which, on examination, was found com- 
posed mainly of the siftings or screenings from linseed. As a 
further illustration of the danger of feeding animals on mixed 
refuse feeding materials, I may quote the case of a gentleman 
who lost fourteen sheep, three horses, and a pony by feeding 
them on food which he bought as cattle-food. 
On receipt of a sample of the food which had done all this 
mischief 1 submitted it to a careful examination, naturally sus- 
pecting some mineral or vegetable poisonous material to have 
become accidentally mixed up with otherwise good feeding sub- 
stances. However, I failed to detect in it any mineral poison, 
nor could I recognise in it any organic substance which is 
known to possess poisonous properties. I found it to be a 
mixture, in which the following ingredients were readily dis- 
tinguished : — 
Irish moss, cotton seeds, and bits of cotton seed-cake ; frag- 
ments of locust-beans, earth-nut-cake, and broken earth-nuts ; 
bits of linseed-cake, linseed, vetches, Indian corn, beans, lentils, 
Dari-grains, barley, hemp-seed, wheat, oats, niger-seed, peas, 
rape-seed, white and black mustard, rye, clover, grass-seeds, 
bran, and a good deal of dirty-looking meal or dust. 
A good many of the bits of cake in this heterogeneous mixed 
food were covered with mould, as were also many of the grains 
of broken wheat, oats, and barley ; and I have no doubt that the 
dust was full of the spores (germs) of fungi, which in all pro- 
bability caused the death of the animals. 
This cattle-food consisted chiefly of the accumulations of 
broken cake, and the sweepings of a general grain or seed ware- 
house, and was readily recognised as such. 
Similar mixtures of all kinds of feeding matters are freely used 
VOL. IX. — S. S. I E 
