REVIEW — REPORT OF THE FARMING OF CORNWALL. 2*29 
winter months is very considerable. I have seen it practised on a 
great number of farms — the horses sometimes getting scarcely 
any thing else than straw and steamed turnips, a little hay and oats 
occasionally when hard worked ; and although they perspire more 
freely than those fed in the usual way, yet they look exceedingly 
well, are particularly sleek and fine in their coats, and appear to 
do their work as well as horses fed only on hay and oats ; and, on 
the whole, they are less liable to disease*. If there is any truth in 
Liebig’s statement — ‘ that every manifestation of force, however 
trivial, is accompanied by a change of matter in the body’ — it 
must be evident that there is no inconsiderable saving effected in 
the wear and tear of the tissues, as well as in the consumption of 
fat, in feeding animals in this manner. In the cutting of hay and 
straw into chaff, in the slicing of turnips, and in the bruising of 
oats and beans, we have examples of economy unwittingly 
practised by the farmer; and there cannot be a doubt that the 
cooking of food, for cattle particularly, will be found to effect still 
further saving. 
PIGS. 
“ The improvement effected in the breed of pigs within the last 
twenty years is greater than in any other of our domesticated 
animals. The old Cornish variety was a large, white-coloured, 
long-sided, heavy-boned, razor-backed animal, that possessed little 
aptitude to fatten. It is now nearly extinct, and when found is 
looked on with wonder. The present varieties are crossings of the 
old breed with the Berkshire, Leicester, Chinese, Neapolitan, and 
the improved Essex. The black-coloured pigs are preferred, as 
the skin of this kind does not blister with the heat of the sun, as in 
the white-coloured breed. They require little other food than 
vegetables and the wash of the farm-house, except during the 
fattening, when 24 gallons of barley-meal will suffice to bring them 
up, at nine months old, to from 350 to 400 lbs.” 
* “ Farm horses are peculiarly liable to flatulent cholic, inflammation of 
the bowels, and acute indigestion, which frequently arises from an indis- 
criminate use of barley-straw and ill saved hay. Pneumonia, or inflam- 
mation of the substance of the lungs, is seldom met with. This arises from 
the mean temperature of the climate, being in Cornwall only 8° — that of 
London is 11°; the effect of which is, that the warmth of summer is never so 
great as to occasion either a too rapid development or too high an excitement 
of organized bodies, nor the cold of winter so extreme as to depress the 
vitality to an injurious degree. On the contrary, tetanic diseases are verj 
common among horses : even the hardy donkey has been known to die of 
traumatic and idiopathic tetanus in a district bordering on the south channel. 
This probably arises from the immense oceanic boundary of the Cornish 
peninsula. 
VOL. XX. 
I 
