131 
ON THE INTESTINAL CONCRETIONS MET WITH 
IN THE HORSES OF MILLERS. 
By C. Page, M.R.C.V.S., Banbury. 
As several instances of intestinal calculi have lately fallen 
under my notice, I have thought a brief account thereof might 
not prove uninteresting to the readers of your Journal, 
The older writers on veterinary medicine are particularly 
barren of information on this subject, which perhaps we might 
wonder at, inasmuch as the ancient physicians were conver- 
sant with the fact, that in the lower animals these concretions 
were occasionally met with. To them they gave the name of 
bezoars, and ascribed to them many extraordinary virtues. 
It is true they confined this term, at first, to such as were 
found in the stomach of a kind of goat, but afterwards it was 
extended to those met with in other animals and in other 
organs. 
Oriental bezoars were formerly much extolled as medicinal 
agents, and we are told that in the East, a true bezoar, or 
bezuar , or bezar , was considered to be a stone found in the 
kidneys of the cervicabra , a wild animal of Arabia, partaking 
of the nature of the deer and the goat, but somewhat larger 
than the latter animal. The stone was supposed to be formed 
of the poison of serpents which had bitten the producer, 
combined with the counteracting matter with which nature 
had furnished it; and was resorted to as a charm against 
plague and poison. 
Vague and indefinite were the descriptions given of the 
constitution of intestinal calculi, as found in the horse, until 
of late years. Blaine expresses no surprise that such should 
exist in the intestines of this animal, as his food abounds with 
siliceous matters. In his earlier editions, he remarks that 
millers’ horses are especially the subjects of them, from their 
feeding on bran, &c., “ the mucilaginous nature of which 
food concretes the minute siliceous particles detached from 
the grindstones.” Other writers attribute the frequency of 
their presence in millers’ horses to their being allowed to 
drink from the margin of the mill-pond, the water of which 
is kept in a state of constant agitation by the movements of 
the wheel; and hence stones, dirt, and other matters find 
their way into their stomach and intestines. 
It unfortunately happens for this theory of their formation, 
that intestinal calculi are not constituted principally of silex, 
nor of an heterogeneous mass of these foreign substances ; 
