Lamenesses of Sheep and Lamhs. 
391 
This is recorded in the first volume of the Journal of the Royal 
Agricultural Society of England. The appropriate treatment 
consists in removing everything that may have tended to develop 
the disease, making the animal as comfortable as possible, open- 
ing the bowels by smart purgatives, as six ounces of salt with a 
scruple of calomel or one or two croton beans ; and, if there be 
weakness, exhibiting nutritive food and mineral tonics, such as 
the sulphate of iron or copper, repeated two or three times a day 
in doses of a drachm. In some cases of paralysis in man nux 
vomica or strychnia is useful, and the same remedies might also 
occasionally be serviceable in sheep. As they are very potent 
and only useful in particular cases, they must however be em- 
ployed with extreme caution. 
Scrofula and Rickets. — Injudicious breeding in and in, bad 
feeding, overcrowding, and other debilitating influences are apt 
to produce in any of the lower animals a peculiar degenerate 
state of system, known as scrofula. In all animals it is indi- 
cated by thinness of the skin, softness of the muscles, and 
delicacy of constitution. It is often hereditary. It frequently 
leads to unhealthy inflammation, accompanied by the outpour- 
ing of yellow, glutinous, tubercular matter, which, instead of 
being organized like healthy lymph, exhibits a great tendency 
to break up and soften. In scrofulous sheep such tubercular 
deposits are laid down in various parts of the body. In early 
life they occur on the membranes of the brain, causing water 
in the head, or in the mesenteric glands, inducing tabes mesen- 
terica, or consumption of the belly. In more advanced life 
they appear chiefly in the lungs, developing all the well known 
symptoms of pulmonary consumption ; on the mucous mem- 
brane of the alimentary canal, producing dysentery ; or in the 
glands about the throat, giving rise to unhealthy, troublesome 
tumours. The scrofulous inatter is sometimes found in the 
synovial membrane of joints, causing a soft puffy enlargement, 
and gradual destruction of the cartilage. Such swellings some- 
times occur in newly-born lambs. The interior of some of the 
larger joints, usually the stifle and hock, are much inflamed, 
swollen, and painful, and contain accumulations of pus, which 
cause much constitutional irritation, and frequently prove fatal 
within a few days after birth. A scrofulous state of system is 
the parent of rickets, which is occasionally met with amongst 
lambs. In this disease the bones, from mal-nutrition, contain an 
imperfect supply of inorganic or earthy matter, and are conse- 
quently soit and yielding. Under the increasing Aveight of the 
animal, they become bent and distorted. In rickets, and indeed 
m all these forms of scrofulous disease, good nutritive food must 
be liberally supplied. Oil-cake, linseed, and such other oleaginous 
