APOPLl£XY IN THE HOKSE. 
3 
farmer than anywhere else. We shall know by-and-by how to 
account for this. Thirty years ago it was the very pest of these 
stables, and the loss sustained by some persons was enormous; 
but as veterinary science progressed, the nature and the cause of 
the disease were better understood, and we have not one case 
now where we had twenty at that time. 
Nature and Cause of the Disease. —To account for this change 
we must consider for a moment the nature of the disease. I have 
already described it as a determination of blood to the brain— 
pressure on the origins of the animal nerves, and, by degrees, 
on the organic ones too, and consequent loss of consciousness 
and of life. What causes this determination of blood to the 
head? Over-condition, and too great fulness of blood. Ideas 
of condition in the horse, very different from those by which our* 
forefathers were guided now prevail. It no longer consists in the 
round sleek carcjss—fat enough for the butcher, if the flesh were 
eaten here—but in fulness and hardness of muscular fibre, and a 
comparative paucity of cellular and adipose matter: in that 
which will add to the power of nature, and not oppress and 
weigh her down. 
The improper System of Feedings a Cause of Staggers.—The 
Coach Horse: —The system of exercise is better understood than 
formerly. It is proportioned to the quantity and quality of the 
food; and, more particularly, the division of labour is ixiore ra¬ 
tional. The stage-horse no longer runs his sixteen or eighteen 
miles. I recollect one stage of two-and-twenty miles which the 
same team of horses used daily to run ; and then, exhausted and 
famished, they were turned into the stable for the next twenty 
hours. The food was eaten voraciously—their (comparatively) 
little stomachs were distended with it before nature had suffi¬ 
ciently recruited herself to carry on the digestive process, and 
there it remained a source of general oppression and danger— 
and, either by the actual distention of the stomach, the vessels 
of that viscus were compressed and the flow of blood through 
them arrested, and more blood sent to other parts, and to the 
brain among the rest, and more to the brain, from its known 
sympathy with the stomach; or that powerful sympathy which 
undeniably exists between these two important parts, being suffi¬ 
cient to account for any cerebral derangement, without this me¬ 
chanical obstruction of the circulation in the one, and extraordi¬ 
nary determination of it to the other:—whatever was the cause, 
these hoises were sadly liable to staggers, and many of them 
perished every year. 
[/lustration. —The custom then prevalent of giving a consider¬ 
able quantity of dry bran mingled with corn, was not a little inju- 
I 
