OF THE SKIN OF THE HORSE. 
247 
The horse, as he is at present kept, especially in towns, may 
be said to live in an artificial state. Nature has apparently 
intended that he should subsist upon the green herbage of the 
field, and the water from the brook. Immense labour is, how¬ 
ever, required from him by man ; and, in order to support the 
great waste occasioned by the necessary actions of the body in 
performing the labour required, more nutritive matter must be 
thrown in than can be furnished in the bulky state in which pro- 
vender for horses is naturally produced. The stomach, then, in 
order to eliminate this greater quantity of nutriment, becomes 
stimulated, and more litible to be affected by acrid substances or 
irritants. 
Another evil seems to be, the heterogeneous mixtures often 
given in a crude state to this class of animals, which retard 
digestion, and also render this process incomplete, by the dif¬ 
ferent degrees of digestibility of the substances forming such 
mixture: thus giving the stomach more to do than it can per¬ 
form, and causing indigestion by the collection of crudities in 
the stomach and smaller intestines. 
Between the internal coat of the stomach and intestines there 
exists a very great sympathy with the skin ; and if the same 
pathology which applies to cutaneous diseases in the human 
subject will apply to horses and black cattle, it must be admit¬ 
ted, that from irritations of the stomach and intestines will fre¬ 
quently originate cutaneous eruptions in these animals also. On 
account of the coating of hair which has been granted to them 
by nature, both to ornament and protect them, there exists a 
great obstacle to the attaining a perfect and distinct knowledge 
of skin diseases; and although, generally speaking, cutaneous 
affections require much the same treatment in all varieties, yet 
whatever can tend to a more accurate diagnosis, or lead to a more 
perfect and definite mode of treatment for each species or variety, 
is not to be disregarded. 
Whether affections of this kind take place principally from a 
sympathy propagated along from the irritated villous coat of the 
stomach to the delicate rete mucosum of the skin, and there pro¬ 
ducing the peculiar action which gives rise to the symptoms of an 
eruptive disease,—or from a vitiated state of the chylous fluid, 
arising from an imperfect action of the digestive apparatus,—or 
the use of acrid substances for food, or mixed accidentally with 
the food, thereby allowing an ill-concocted and irritating supply 
to be throwm into the circulating mass of blood, vitiating all the 
secretions, and breaking forth in exanthematous disease, might 
become matter of dispute. That all these causes, however, may 
act, 1 think is evident; and I am much disposed to believe, if 
