198 
The Illustrated Book of Poultry. 
the hen. Persian powder also gives immediate relief. The cooping-ground and sleeping-place 
should also be well sprinkled with carbolic disinfecting powder, and there will be no more 
trouble. The scattering of the powder from a dredger in the nest and about the sleeping-place 
will prevent any need for other measures. 
Liver Disease. — Of late years persistent in-breeding, combined with high feeding and want 
of exercise, and the injudicious use of condiments, have caused an alarming increase in cases 
of disordered liver amongst poultry. These vary much in symptoms, nature, and seriousness. 
Poultry in small yards, during summer, unless plentifully supplied with fresh green food, 
are very liable to enlargement or hypertrophy ot the liver. The symptoms are not very definite, 
consisting chiefly of sluggishness in motion and appetite, and a tendency to somewhat yellow 
evacuations. The condition cannot be cured, but may be kept in check by shade, a more spare 
diet, green food, and an occasional dose of salts or carbonate of potash. 
Congestion is due to very similar causes, and the symptoms are similar, but more severe, and 
more evidently bilious, sometimes reaching to a distinct yellow shade about the face. Maize 
causes many cases. The treatment is a course of saline purgatives, such as ten grains of potass- 
bicarbonate and six of Epsom salt twice a day for a few days, or alternated with six grains of 
rhubarb ; or if the attack seems sudden, a grain of calomel will be very useful. To the water add 
twenty drops of nitric acid per half-pint. 
Actual inflammation of the liver is a disease of the same class, but of the most acute kind, 
and is speedily followed by death unless the attack can be relieved. The causes may be as before, 
but in our experience exposure to ivet and cold, , in conjunction with other causes tending to 
congestion, produces inflammation more frequently than! heat does. There will be somewhat 
similar symptoms, but with evidently most severe suffering, and especially the bird will evidently 
show tenderness, or pain. The skin is almost always yellow, and the evacuations yellow or 
tinged with blood. The bird may seem too tender to move about much, and very often there is 
lameness, especially in the right leg : if lameness accompanies other symptoms, the disease is nearly 
certain. Only energetic treatment is of any avail. The bird is to be held frequently over boiling 
water, when the steam will relieve the pain and inflammation ; and half a grain each of calomel and 
opium must be at once given, repeated after four hours ; when ten drops of chlorodyne may be 
given every four hours for two days. All water to be acidulated with nitric acid as before, and the 
bird kept undisturbed, and only allowed a small quantity of bread and milk. If the urgent 
symptoms disappear, careful diet and small doses of salines will complete the cure. 
None of the preceding, though they may weaken the progeny, necessarily impart any 
constitutional disease. But the case is very different with scrofulous disease of the liver, the 
most common development in poultry of the strumous or tuberculous taint. This is shown 
post-mortem by deposits in the liver of nodules of cheesy matter, and in life by failure of appetite 
and gradual wasting. Early breeding, by its tax on the system, and in-breeding, have lately 
developed this constitutional disease to an alarming extent, and it sometimes bursts out so widely 
that it has been held to be contagious ; but of this in the proper sense we can find no evidence, 
and believe such cases to be due to common causes producing similar results. There is no doubt 
that, where some predisposition exists, healthy conditions may ward it off; and, on the other 
hand, where the disposition is really but slight, cold and wet, with injudicious food, especially 
maize, will develop it rapidly. To this extent the disease mg.y depend upon circumstances. But 
it is, broadly, a constitutional disease, and is spread chiefly by breeding from fancy stock, which 
by in-breeding or other causes has developed the taint. Such a stock may be protected and 
