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EDITORIAL OBSERVATIONS. 
eases which, when they attack horses just entering, or having 
entered, into puberty, we have to regard with the greatest 
suspicion ; and it is to their prevention, or mildness of attack 
and shortness of duration, that we must principally look in 
order to save our horses from becoming roarers. 
Under the present precocious system of racing, the double 
object of keeping a colt in health, at the same time that he is 
being “ got into condition” for racing, must prove, at this 
critical period of the animal’s life, especially in certain 
seasons and under certain circumstances, an extremely diffi- 
cult matter. With a young horse which has no occasion to 
be stabled before his fourth or fifth year, and, consequently, 
of whose colthood so much at least is ensured to be passed 
in health, the case is different to that of the racer; who 
must needs be, like a hot-house plant, forced beyond the 
growth and development which nature, left to herself, would 
have given him : his chance of getting harmless through his 
season of colthood being doubly hazardous. He becomes 
more obnoxious to disease of the respiratory membrane, 
takes it at an earlier and a tenderer age than the half-bred does ; 
and is so much the more likely to suffer serious consequences 
from it. From this we may learn one potent reason why 
turf horses are apt to suffer so much more severely from such 
complaint than other horses : why, in other words, so many 
of them turn out, when they come to work, to prove roarers. 
To this, we fancy we hear the “ nobleman” saying, “ that 
may be all very true, but how T is it all to be prevented ; or, if not 
prevented, how is the disease, wdien it does assail the animal, 
to be cured?” So long as the present system of ^^-racing 
continues, and the same mode of rearing, stabling, and feed- 
ing, entailed by it, persisted in (the latter being found the 
best to answer the requirements of the former) so long, we 
may answer, such grievances must be endured. On subjects 
so susceptible as young race-horses, under such a mode of 
regimen, are, and, we may add, so inflammatory as their 
constitutions thereby are rendered, can w r e wonder at dis- 
ease, when it does set in, proving so violent and so disor- 
ganising. And w T e ask, in the present stage of our medical 
