TRANSLATIONS FROM CONTINENTAL JOURNALS. 687 
but little for lean meat, however delicate it might be. What 
they like is fat meat, or in its absence, vegetables well 
impregnated with fat or butter. They eat, with evident 
pleasure, such fat bacon as would disgust the sedentary inha¬ 
bitant of the town. 
This universal use of fatty matters for our food does not 
depend on caprice, but on an imperious necessity of our 
nature. The desire for it, when general, is only the expression 
of this necessity. 
The author considers the question, whether the maladies, 
from which sheep and cattle suffer have any relation with 
this subject of diet, and states that a certain malady in sheep 
(sang de rate ) has been more frequent since the system of 
artificial pasturage has been introduced, and leguminous 
plants have been substituted for the gramineous and aro¬ 
matic herbs; and, in fact, that it prevails more in those 
places where the meadows have been ploughed up, while it 
suffices oftentimes to diminish its ravages to remove the 
flocks to loamy or marshy land covered with plants belonging 
to the graminea, or to depasture them on young rye, barley, 
or oats. 
As to pleuro-pneumonia, a disease which has made such 
ravages amongst cattle of late years, it is without doubt more 
common than formerly. It is more fatal also in the stables of 
the distillers and milkmen, where the animals are fed on beet¬ 
root and grains, which have a greater proportion of nitrogen 
than carbon. If we bear in mind that the graminea are 
richer in carbon than the leguminosae, and that, when cattle 
are depastured on the natural grass, they fatten both sooner 
and better than when depastured on artificial meadows, such 
as clover and lucerne, may it not be presumed that diet 
exercises a great influence on the development of certain 
diseases in cattle ? and that that diet in which nitrogen is 
superabundant contributes either to their production in some 
way or other, or predisposes the animals to the contraction of 
them ? 
This question is, however, a very complicated one, and it 
would be very dangerous to come to the conclusion that the 
food which constitutes so great a part of the w ealth of the agri¬ 
culturist is detrimental to the health of our domestic animals, 
on account of the abundance of nitrogen it contains. But at the 
same time it is most important to discover the truth, and to 
ascertain w hether these artificial foods are the cause of certain 
maladies which were unknow n to the ancients. 
The author next examines the question, whether the 
amount of carbon required varies according to the breed of 
