REVIEW.—CATTLE PATHOLOGY. 
439 
1. Those which act directly on the villous portion of the gastro¬ 
intestinal mucous coat, such as food, drink, medicine, among which 
we may reckon acrid, stimulating, and heating plants; hard and 
woody food, difficult of digestion, as the sword-grass, the iris, seve¬ 
ral species of the rush, and the reed. It is not always necessary to 
hold, with Chabert, that these plants are acrid and stimulating— 
they are simply food that is difficult of digestion and assimilation. 
The upright and the celery-leaved ranunculus {acris et sceleratus) 
are much more dangerous than those that grow on a wet land, and 
in rainy seasons. If they are used when green they are a verita¬ 
ble poison; but when eaten dry, they are less deleterious, although 
they sometimes produce enteritis and diarrhoea, which, however, 
yield to proper treatment. All these accidents disappear if better 
food is given to the cattle. 
The colchicum is also an acrid poison which animals rarely eat 
when green, unless they are pressed by hunger. These plants, 
however, are too frequently the cause of gastro-enteritis, and en- 
tero-nephritis, which too often bid defiance to all medical care. 
Food badly gathered, and saturated with dirt and mire, or 
mouldiness, or mildew, or in any way damaged, or more or less 
rotten, and which the animals are compelled to eat in times of 
scarcity and during a severe winter, either from the bad manage¬ 
ment or misfortune of the proprietor, have a much more ready and 
deleterious influence on the mucous membrane, and are mischiev¬ 
ously active on animals whose organs are weakened by starvation 
and misery. These aliments are also difficult of digestion ; they 
accumulate in the stomach, acting slowly and imperceptibly at first, 
but at length producing frequent and continued indigestion. Then 
commences the extrication of gas, which distends the digestive or¬ 
gans, and determines a general or partial emphysema that com¬ 
plicates the gastro-enteritis with an adynamic state of the constitu¬ 
tion, and accompanied by crepitating tumours of a grangrenous 
nature. 
Green food taken from artificial meadows, or papilionaceous 
plants, also fodder freshly collected, and from which carbonic acid 
gas disengages itself, meteorize the rumen, and sometimes produce 
secondary gastritis; and if the super-excitation of the rumen is 
prolonged by the continuity of the action of the cause, and which 
itself reacts strongly on the nervous system, gastritis becomes com¬ 
plicated with arachnitis and vertigo. 
Aqueous and cold food covered with dew, or with white frost, 
has sometimes a prompt and sudden action, which produces 
haemorrhage from the intestines, or gangrene by excess of inflam¬ 
mation, and, most of all, abortion in the cows. Such is also the 
effect of water imbued with much selenite, and pairticularly cold 
water drawn from wells or fountains, or mineral streams, especially 
