Cattle Condiments. 
425 
]\Ir. Lawes ( Kothamsted ) did not think anybody who liad 
listened to this discussion could doubt that Thorley's Food had 
certain beneficial qualities. Mr. Brown and other gentlemen who 
had stated their experience spoke rather of its merits as a medicine ; 
but the question which chiefly aflected them, as agriculturists, was 
whether these things were beneficial for animals in health ; whether, 
ill that case, they would be a good substitute for, or assistant to, 
natural food. The medicinal part of the question, namely, whether 
this food was beneficial or not as regarded sick and diseased animals, 
was a very limited one. He admitted that there were tonic pro- 
perties in this food. In his experiments, nothing was more striking 
than the greatly-increased consumption of food to which these 
condiments led. The pigs consumed a larger amount ; but there 
was no benefit in that, unless they assimilated more food : in this 
ease they got an increased consumption of food without an increase 
of flesh. If, therefore, the condiment had been given to him, he 
would rather not use it, because his animals, in order to produce 
the same amount of meat on bailey -meal, ate more. 
At the same time that he made these experiments on pigs, he tried 
also what etfect this food would produce on sheep. These experiments 
were not quite complete, but he would give an outline of the result 
at the end of sixteen weeks. Twenty sheep were picked out of a 
very large flock, all being as nearly as possible of the same weight. 
Five of them were put on linseed-cake, hay, and swedes. They 
had 1 lb. of hay per day, i lb. of linseed-cake, and as much swedes 
as they liked to eat. The corresponding five sheep received the 
same amount of hay, but only 6 oz. of linseed-cake, and 2 oz. of 
Thorley's condiment, and swedes ad libitum. The other ten he 
fed with cotton-seed cake, instead of linseed-cake. He did not 
find that the sheep ate a bit more food when they received Thorley's 
condiment than when they did not receive it ; the consumption in 
the two cases was exactly alike ; so that the condiment had not the 
same effect on the ruminant animal that it had on the pig. 
The real question was, how much food passed through the animal to 
produce 100 lbs. increase of flesh ? He found that, without Thorley's 
Food, it required 274 lbs. of clover-chaff, 137 lbs. of linseed-cake, 
and 3824 lbs. of swedes. With Thorley's Food, it took 285 lbs. of 
clover-chaft", 107 lbs. of linseed-cake, 3980 lbs. of swedes, and 35 lbs. 
also of Thorley's Food; the difference between the two being, that 
in one case it took 4236 lbs., and in the other 4409 lbs. : that was to 
say, with Thorley's Food, about 200 lbs. more food was required to 
produce a given increase. The sheep were not yet killed. Still, 
sixteen weeks' experiments were, he thought, sufficient to give a 
tolerable idea of what would be the result, the gross amount of the 
produce being 4536 lbs. without Thorley's Food and 4576 lbs, with 
it. The difference was not much ; still, in both cases, a rather 
larger amount of food was required to secure a certain increase of 
flesh when Thorley's Food was used. That result was, he thought, 
exactly what science would have predicted ; there was nothing in 
science to show that things which had tonic or stimulating pro- 
