VETERINARY JURISPRUDENCE. 
621 
saw the sheep, and could not deny that they were coathed , but lie said 
that they must have been coathed in the plaintiff’s fields. Mr. Rowe, the 
plaintiff’s attorney, wrote a letter to the defendant, suggesting- that he 
should come to an arrangement with the plaintiff, but the defendant 
replied, through his son, that the sheep were sound when sold; that if 
plaintiff put the sheep on unsound keep, he (defendant) could not be re¬ 
sponsible for the consequence. Another letter was received from the 
defendant, in which he said that he could prove that the plaintiff’s farm 
was unhealthy from selling off all his sheep last year diseased. But the 
fact was that the plaintiff had not sold off all his sheep, and that he had 
not sold a single diseased sheep ; all he sold were healthy. The plaintiff 
then sold the sheep by auction for 22s. 6d. each. Having kept the 
sheep for some weeks, they ought to have been worth 45s., and he 
brought his action for the difference, and some expenses. The learned 
counsel recapitulated the points of the case, and called his witnesses. 
The plaintiff and the following witnesses were examined :— Mr. John 
Rout ley, plaintiff’s brother; and Mr, John Yell and, plaintiff’s shepherd; 
Richard Batten, the man who drove the sheep to Kilkhampton; Mr. 
Elliott , Mr. Hopper, and Mr. W. Matthews, farmer. Mr. Gregory , 
M.R.C.V.S. , Bideford, who had opened and examined some of the dis¬ 
eased sheep, said that the disease of coathe is generally contracted in 
the period between Midsummer and Michaelmas, or October. The 
disease must have existed three months to produce the flukes that I saw 
in the sheep. I think that the “ oil bag ” would not have shown itself 
in less than a month after the disease had been contracted. 
(One of the witnesses had said that he noticed an “ oil bag” in the 
neck of one of the sheep a month after they were bought.) 
Cross-examined by Mr. Karslake. — He thought that the flukes had 
not been taken in by successive feedings of the sheep, fie noticed that 
some of the flukes in the liver were larger than others, many being so 
minute that they could only be seen by the microscope. He was of 
opinion that the pupa of these flukes might have been taken by the 
sheep at the same time, and that some of them were developed earlier than 
others. This witness was examined by Mr. Karslake on the natural his¬ 
tory of the entozoa, his theories being mostly founded on Professor 
Simonds’ recent work on the fluke in sheep. 
This closed the case for the plaintiff. 
Mr. Karslake, Q.C., addressed the jury for the defence. He said 
that the defendant did not dispute that he gave a warranty that the 
sheep were sound at the time he sold them to the plaintiff. The 
case of the plaintiff was that they were evidently coathed very shortly 
after they were bought; but it was not till the 25th of December that 
the plaintiff informed the defendant that the sheep were diseased. This 
was inconsistent with the duty of a man who found that there was a 
breach of the warranty of the animals he had bought, inasmuch as it 
was for him to send back the animals to the seller directly he discovered 
that there had been a breach of warranty. Jn failing to do this at the 
earliest opportunity the plaintiff had put the defendant to disadvantage, 
because it prevented him from getting the best evidence to show that 
the sheep were diseased from something that occurred after the sale. 
In dealing with the probabilities of the case the learned counsel stated 
that he should produce evidence to show that the defendant had had 
his farm for twenty-nine years ; that for this period he had never had a 
coathed sheep upon the farm ; that he had taken thirty-six sheep to 
Boscastle fair for sale on the day in question; that the plaintiff again 
and again minutely examined those sheep and chose twenty-four of 
