254 
AMERICAN VETERINARY PRACTICE. 
will cure it,” — “ I will' cure it,” is the common talk. The 
animal must be bled, whether it requires it or not ; some- 
thing rammed down its throat; and then the party wajks 
in for the dollars. 
Cincinnati is a large and increasing city of about 160,000 
inhabitants, a considerable number of whictT are Germans, 
occupying a part of the city, which is divided by a canal from 
that occupied by people from almost every nation in the 
world. There is a great number of horse bazaars, of a size 
there is nothing like in Scotland. The horses are collected 
here from the breeders in the forests, and sold or shipped to 
New Orleans and to the different states in the south ; where, it 
seems, their existence is but of short duration, for there are 
daily sales by auction. In one street there are four places, 
two on each side, opposite each other, where the auctioneers 
would rather astonish a stranger by their go-a-head practice, 
at the rate of fifty words for every one spoken by any of our 
horse auctioneers ; and equally clever at cheating and lying, 
as many of them profess to be. 
There, the diseases of horses are rather puzzlers to a new- 
comer among them. They have the Bots, the Hooks , the 
Swinnie, and the Big Hecid. The bots are certainly more 
prevalent there than here. There we are told the gadfly is 
supposed to deposit its eggs upon the hairs of the legs, mane, 
&c., though we rarely see them ; there, a horse that has been 
out at pasture, if dark-coloured, comes in almost grey; eggs 
are deposited on every hair; and what is rather curious, 
they seem to be deposited only on the parts the animal can 
reach with his mouth, or where another horse is likely to 
bite him. The mane, the legs, the sides, the flanks, are 
coverecT. There are but few on the back, and none on the 
tail. Whether or not these eggs are deposited by the gadfly 
I do not know. I sent a few of them to Professor Dick; 
but I have heard no opinion about them. I had several op- 
portunities of examining horses after death, and have always 
found hundreds of bots in the stomach for one I have seen 
here. A fine young blood gelding was brought in to 
Messrs. Smith’s stables one day, among a lot purchased by 
a dealer in Kentucky. Being taken down south, he had 
been ill a day and night before lie came, and I was called on 
to treat him ; he appeared to be in the last stage of enteritis, 
and soon after died. On a post-mortem examination, I 
found the intestines very much inflamed, the stomach in a 
state of gangrene, perforated in five or six places, and hun- 
dreds of small bots sticking to it and floating in its contents 
in the abdomen. 
