344 ON THE DISEASES OF FARM HOUSES. 
times store pigs, in large open straw-yards during the winter 
months. Many of these places have little or no shelter or pro¬ 
tection from the weather—and a want of sufficient drainage is 
more common than otherwise: they are places, indeed, far better 
adapted to the manufacturing of manure than the winter lodging 
of cart-colts. 
The food, too, that is sometimes supplied to them in these 
places is of very inferior character, being chiefly oaten-straw 
and the refuse of hay of the working horses—an abundant 
supply of turnips, and sometimes plenty of decayed potatoes. 
I have witnessed this picture many a time in farm establish¬ 
ments, and it is a wonder that more diseases and accidents do 
not occur than there really do. 
The functions most active in colts are those which administer 
to growth, such as the organs of digestion and assimilation ; 
and hence derangement of the digestive organs is common to 
colts reared in this manner—seen in the numerous cases of lean¬ 
ness, hidebound, general oedema, diarrhoea, worms, lice, &c.; 
and in this spiritless state catarrh and other disorders of the 
respiratory organs are commonly produced, from the influence 
of cold and wet and insufficient food. 
A tubercular predisposition is frequently produced in colts 
reared in this manner; producing disease of the mesenteric 
glands, and mucous follicles of the small intestines, which be¬ 
come enlarged, and filled with unhealthy pus and tuberculous 
matters, arising from mal-nutrition, the consequences of poverty 
of blood. Bad food, rapid growth, and the vicissitudes of wet 
and cold are the common origin of tubercular disease. 
When you see colts that have undergone two or three winters 
of this short-sighted system of management, having their skins 
rigid—sticking, as it were, to the ribs—the hair dull and dead 
like, and the summer’s keep fail to recover them, you may form 
a shrewd guess as to the nature of the disease. 
In old horses the lungs are the chief seat of tubercular disease, 
and death is the natural consequence of the disease in the quad¬ 
ruped as in man, and the same lesions are discovered after death. 
The lungs are thickly set with tubercles, which are hard, softened, 
or ulcerated; they are isolated, or they form caverns of various 
sizes, as in man. Sometimes there are portions of the lungs, more 
or less extensive, which are hepatized. 
Farmers who mismanage their young horses in the manner 
described, do so from a mistaken notion of economy. They 
imagine that the summer’s keep will compensate for the partial 
starvation of winter. But the growing animal requires food not 
only to sustain itself, but to maintain its growth. The organic 
materials of a living body are constantly changing; portions of 
