224 
EFFECTS OF MEDICINE ON HORSES. 
medicine by extirpating all purgatives, and substituting some 
powerful diaphoretics in their stead,” &c. “ However,” continues 
our author, “ I thought myself indispensably obliged to inquire 
into the safest methods of purging horses and accordingly he did 
so, and found “ the best to be a mixture containing a pound and a 
half of olive oil, five ounces of the pulp of coloquintida (colocynth), 
an ounce and a half of flower of linseed,” &c The aperient virtues 
of olive oil, therefore, and of linseed too, were known to Sol- 
leysell, and he considered these safer, because milder in their 
operation, than aloes. How all this trips us up in our present 
(“ improved”) practice ! Does not many a veterinarian at the present 
time exhibit ol. olivce in cases where he requires a milder and 
quicker cathartic than his common purging mass will furnish him 
with 1 After all, however, for general or ordinary purposes we are, 
as it were, driven to the aloe plant : nothing else in nature with 
which we are acquainted will produce the same uniform, certain, 
and safe purgation ; and therefore no person — not the surgeon 
even — can have equal interest with ourselves in the cultivation of 
this plant, and in the preparation of its products. In the pharmacy 
of the surgeon, although the aloe may be acknowledged as a ser- 
viceable drug, yet is it one in whose place another might on most, 
if not all, occasions be substituted ; whereas, in the veterinarian’s 
pharmacy, ALOES holds the highest place — stands, indeed, almost, 
in point of importance, in a place by itself. 
What the peculiarities of susceptibility — that which causes what 
Solleysell characterizes as “ the extreme repugnancy in the nature 
of horses to yield to the operation of purgatives” — the idiosyn- 
crasies, may be which admit the bowels of the horse to be purged 
freely and readily by aloes, and yet refuse their being acted on by 
any of the numerous agents that take the like effect on our own 
bowels, I am not now about to inquire: I would simply, en passant, 
allege as one apparent cause for such opposite results the dif- 
ferences of construction of the alimentary passages in horses from 
those in men, in ruminants, &c. ; and when we come to consider 
these differences, and make due allowance for them in respect to 
function, we shall not have occasion to express so much surprise 
that the same cause, operant upon both, should produce dissimilar 
effects. Salts and senna and jalap and rhubarb make their first 
impression upon the stomach, and the brunt of their subsequent 
operation falls upon the small intestines. Now, in horses, we 
know that all fluids, and many solids — medicines, perhaps, among 
the number — pass through the stomach quickly, if not at once, into 
the intestines, and from thence rapidly onward into the large intes- 
tines, which, in the equine species, may be regarded as kinds of 
secondary stomachs; consequently, medicines whose operation is 
