403 
IN THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES. 
that in all cases of illness there were three things to consider,— 
the patient, the disease, and the doctor; and that if any two of 
them pulled well together, they would be able to beat the third. 
In the case I have been supposing, it is the disease and the doc¬ 
tor against the patient. 
Cows, again, stuff themselves with cabbage, or other succulent 
food, which by-and-by ferments, and gives out a great deal of 
carbonic acid gas ; the stomach becomes distended, and, if relief 
be not speedily afforded, the animal dies. Many a valuable 
creature has perished in this way, whose life might have been 
saved, if the owner had been chemist enough to know what 
would stop the fermentation, or had been provided with me¬ 
chanical instruments for drawing off the gas. And these attacks 
are sudden ; remedies to be useful must be near. There is no 
time to fetch the doctor, even supposing him to be worth fetching. 
The owner himself must know what to do, and how to do it. It 
is not proposed to make every farmer an accomplished surgeon ; 
that would be impossible ; but it is not impossible, and it would 
not be useless, to teach him at school something of the structure 
and diseases of the animals on whose health his fortune depends ; 
something of the symptoms by which those diseases are indi¬ 
cated, and something of the operation of the most important 
medicines. Being so constantly slaughtered for domestic pur¬ 
poses, there would never be wanting opportunities of studying 
their organization. The national gain, by diffusion of this sort of 
knowledge, would be immense. According to Mr. Colquhoun’s 
estimate, there were in the United Kingdom, so long ago as 
1812,— 
1,800,000 horses. 
10,000,000 horned cattle. 
42,000,000 sheep and lambs. 
There are no tables published of sickness and mortality amongst 
quadrupeds; but out of 53,000,000, the deaths occasioned by 
disease in the course of a year must amount to an enormous to¬ 
tal. In Holland, above 500,000 cattle are known to have died 
of disease within twenty years. At £10 a-piece, this would 
come to £250,000 a-year. The tenth part of one year’s 
loss, upon this article of cows alone, would be enough to put into 
operation, throughout the whole kingdom, schools which would 
create ten times as much wealth annually as was ever lost by the 
death of cows. If money laid out in diffusing knowledge pro¬ 
duced a return of only one hundred-fold, it would be certainly 
an eligible investment; but a hundred-fold would be little 
compared with its eventual products. 
It has already been hinted, that the instruction here proposed 
