ON DISEASES OF THE DENTAL APPARATUS. 209 
5th, That instead of these fossse, therefore, being the result of 
disease, they are neither more nor less than “ oil cisterns ,” or re- 
servoirs, for supplying synovia continuedly to those parts of the 
articulation which, by their mechanical relations to each other, are 
most liable to be affected by friction*. 
ON DISEASES OF THE DENTAL APPARATUS IN 
HERBIVOROUS ANIMALS. 
By Professor BOULEY, of Alf or t ; and PEARSON B. FERGUSON, 
Esq., late Attache to the British Embassy at Paris. 
The maladies of the apparatus of mastication in herbivorous 
animals, and principally in the horse, present, in a practical point 
of view, somewhat a high interest; and the clinical facts that we 
have had occasion to observe and gather together on this subject 
having been rather numerous of late, we have thought it a duty 
to unite in the same table all the considerations that bear upon this 
part of special pathology, and lay them before the profession. 
To apprehend the interest which ought to be attached to the 
subject that we propose to treat, it is sufficient to remember that 
the digestive apparatus in our domesticated animals reigns, by the 
importance of its function, over all the other apparatus of the 
economy. The active centre of all the products that animals ren- 
der us, it is upon its perfect integrity that depends the perfection 
of their aptitude to the different services for which they are used 
by man. 
The truth of this proposition is especially evident in its appli- 
cation to animals of labour. Labour, the most weakening of all 
the products that the animal economy can render, soon becomes 
for this latter a cause of deterioration, and, in fact, rapid ruin, if 
the digestive apparatus does not incessantly suffice, by its func- 
tional activity, for the reparation well proportioned to the immense 
loss of vitality in, or, to speak more correctly, enormous decom- 
position of, the animal tissues that is necessarily caused by labour. 
Now, the integrity of the digestive functions finds itself in the 
herbivorous animals especially, under the influence of the masti- 
catory apparatus. If the fibrous and resistant aliments by which 
these animals are nourished have not primitively suffered in the 
mouth, under the powerful action of the dental eminences, that 
* Vide Veterinarian, vol. xi, page 493. 
