40 
DOMESTIC ANIMALS. 
quire more. With reference to the flow of the saliva, without entering 
upon the question how far it is necessary to assist digestion, no animal 
can swallow its food without a sufficiency of saliva to assist the act ot 
deglutition ; and it is not recommended to reduce the oats to flour, but 
merely to bruise them. Many persons fancy that by giving oats in 
small quantities and spreading them thinly over the manger the horses 
will be induced to masticate them. Those who have watched their 
operations will find that a greedy-feeding horse will drive his corn up 
into a heap, and collect with his lips as much as he thinks proper for a 
mouthful. . ... 
Little if any advantage arises from cutting hay into chaff, especially 
for the most valuable kind of horses. It is done in cart stables to pre- 
vent waste, which is often enormous in those departments where horses 
are permitted to pull the hay out of their racks and tread it underfoot. 
The state of perfection to which the higher classes of the horse have 
been brought in this country, is attributable to the great attention de- 
voted during a long period of time to the selection of the best dcscrip 
tions for the purpose of perpetuating the species; the treatment they 
have received under the influence of a propitious climate, and the natuie 
of the food with which they have been supplied ; greater improvements 
are capable of being realized by judicious management. 
Value Of Different Kinds Of Food.— Professor Playfair, who has made 
experiments on tlie quantity of nutritious matter contained in diffeient 
kinds of food supplied to animals, found that in one hundred lbs. of 
oats, eleven lbs. represent the quantity of gluten wherewith flesh is 
formed, and that an equal weight of hay affords eight lbs. of similar 
substance. Both hay and oats contain about sixty-eight per cent, of 
unazotized matter identical with fat, of which it must be observed a vast 
portion passes off from the animal without being deposited. By this 
calculation, it appears that if a horse consumes daily four feeds ot oats 
and ten lbs. of hay, the nutriment which he derives will be equivalent 
to about one lb. eleven oz. of muscle, and thirteen and a half lbs. ot su- 
perfluous matter, which, exclusively of water, nearly approximates the 
exhaustion of the system by perspiration and the various evacuations. 
Oats have been selected as that portion of the food which is to afford 
the principal nourishment. They contain seven hundred and forty- 
three parts out of a thousand of the nutritive matter. They should be 
about or somewhat less than a year old — heavy, dry and sweet. New 
oats will weigh ten or fifteen per cent, more than old ones, but the dif- 
ference consists principally in watery matter, which is gradually evapo- 
rated. New oats are not so readily ground down by the teeth as old 
ones. They form a more glutinous mass, difficult to digest, and when 
eaten in considerable quantities are apt to occasion colic, 01 even stag- 
o-ers. 
Barley is a common food of the horse on various parts ot the Conti- 
nent, and, until the introduction of the oat, seems to have constituted 
almost his only food. It is more nutritious than oats, containing nine 
hundred and twenty parts of nutritive matter in every thousand. I here 
seems, however, to 'be something necessary besides a great proportion 
of nutritive matter, in order to render any substance strengthening, 
