50 
Pure and Mixed Linseed-Cakes. 
by makers of adulterated linseed-cakes, or compound feeding- 
cakes, and are a fertile source of the injury which such cakes 
are liable to produce when given to sheep or cattle in any con- 
siderable quantity. 
It is difficult at all times, and in most cases next to impos- 
sible, to ascertain positively whether in the manufacture of cheap 
com pound-cakes or inferior adulterated linseed-cakes, materials 
have been used which in a separate form were unsaleable, because 
their condition was such as to render them unfit for feeding pur- 
poses. It is easy enough to recognise an oilcake covered with 
mould, and possessing a rancid and sour taste and fusty smell, 
as a material which cannot be given with impunity to cattle ; but 
when the same cake has been superficially scrubbed with a hard 
brush, stove-dried, ground fine, and mixed with some good lin- 
seed and pressed afresh into cake, the bad and injurious pro- 
perties of the spoiled food, which forms a part of the compound 
cake, may become disguised by the process of manufacture to an 
extent which renders it impossible to determine by any known 
chemical test whether the compound or adulterated linseed-cake 
will be wholesome, or prejudicial to the health of the animals 
that are fed upon it. An analogous example of the difficulty of 
recognising by analysis, or by the most careful inspection or 
microscopic examination, the poisonous characters of a compound 
article of food, is presented to us in sausages, made partly from 
diseased and unwholesome meat. In a separate form such meat 
presents to the eye and touch such an unmistakeably bad con- 
dition, that the meat-market inspector feels no hesitation in 
condemning it at once as unfit for human food ; but if it should 
happen, as it does sometimes, that diseased and unwholesome 
meat finds its way into the hands of the unscrupulous pork- 
butcher and sausage-maker, and is by him boiled, minced fine, 
mixed with bread-crumbs and some good minced pork, salt, 
spices, &c., and made into sausages, nobody can say a priori, 
nor ascertain by chemical analysis, whether the sausages are 
likely to prove wholesome or poisonous to those who partake of 
them ; and it is only by the effects which such food produces on 
the system that its true character becomes apparent. Nor is it 
always possible, by the effects which suspected articles of food 
produce, to discern distinctly their dangerous or injurious pro- 
perties, for the constitution of individual animals varies greatly, 
and with it their power to resist the evil effects which damaged 
and mouldy feeding materials produce on less vigorous con- 
stitutions. Hence the same food, which apparently does no 
harm to some animals, seriously affects the health of others, 
and may become rank poison to individual heads of the same 
herd. 
