262 
SCROFULOUS DISEASE IN PIGS. 
after, the skin maintains the conditions under which they 
have been produced, and which preserve the purity of the 
breed, the offspring rapidly degenerate, and we find nothing 
but castaways without number. There came, on speculation, 
an English boar (from Yorkshire) remarkable for his beauty 
and breadth of shape ; but this boar, such are the types of the 
different breeds which come to us from England, was made 
up of continued forcing, all directed to one rational end. 
Types such as this are all artificial, not excepting even the 
thorough-bred horse, and when the hand of man can no 
longer, by this type, fashion the progeny, the product is 
bastardized, its valuable characters diminish, and external 
influences once more prevail. 
I was saying, then, that there w r as a Yorkshire boar of 
great beauty, which, coupled w ith the females of the farm, 
produced a numerous progeny, much resembling himself in 
their beautiful make and other properties. The sow s brought 
these well up to the period of their being weaned ; but these 
pigs, though much stronger than other pigs which had issued 
from crossing the farm-house sows with strange boars, even 
of a common breed, w hen they came to be turned out in the 
fields to get their own living, died off rapidly, w hile the others 
thrived and grew w r ell. Still, if these were well fed and 
looked after, they w ould thrive and do as well as their parents 
have done. 
Alimentation . — Of whatever kind food may be, unless it 
contain fibrine, albumen, and caseine, it is not alimentary. 
Milk contains caseine, one of the reparatory principles. 
Caseine, fibrine, and albumen are, on isomeric principles, 
transformable one into the other. So great is the power of the 
organism that the young subject will transform the caseine 
he receives into the albumen and fibrine necessary for the 
blood, the muscles, &c. 
During lactition, therefore, nutrition is simple enough, 
but afterw ards it becomes changed. Health which had been 
flourishing during the time of lactation, sank under the 
w r eaning process ; and yet these young subjects ate a suffi- 
ciency of food. One cause of this falling off seeming to me to 
be the chemical composition of the meal they consumed, 
which, on being analysed, yielded, along with abundance of 
azote, in 1000 parts, 27'88 of vegetable, along with a pro- 
portion of gluten of 29*32 ; besides starch, salts of potash, 
and lime, soda and magnesia, abundance of fatty oil (112*68) 
w ith mucilage and debris cle la coque 443*82. These debris de 
coc/ues probably consist chiefly of silica. 
From this important analysis, linseed is found to contain 
