704 te grass-staggers/* or lead-poisoning. 
in hand, a fair hearing. Of Mr. McIntosh I know nothing, 
except by his name and address as they appear in your 
columns, and his professional standing I have from the same 
source. As a student, I thought he might be the better for a 
hint as to where he would obtain further information upon a 
subject he (in my opinion) was ill informed upon. 
Mr. McIntosh says, I made only assertions.—What would 
he have ? I told him the symptoms he described were in 
my opinion those of “ lead-poisoning,” and referred him to 
a valuable treatise in which he would find information upon 
the subject. 
I have now a serious charge to bring against Mr. 
McIntosh, viz., that he does not truthfully quote my words. 
If Mr. McIntosh knows nothing of me except by what 
is found in my letter of September, he cannot say whether I 
have had four, fourteen, or forty years’ experience. I refer 
to literature of a certain period, and his remarks are not 
honest with that clause of my letter, for I cannot but con¬ 
sider him capable of understanding it. 
Mr. McIntosh asks me in what person he ought to have 
written? Does he really want me to tell him? Might he 
not have done throughout the whole communication that 
which he did in the end of it—if he must need write—quote 
the words of other men? He surely must have had an 
opinion from Mr. Paterson and Mr. Strangeways, and any 
other that might come in his way.—Surely a neatly got up 
essay, culled from, and acknowledged to be the opinions of 
worthy men, handsomely linked together with the taste 
and genius of a student might have been less egotistic, and 
still brought the writer into notice—more especially if like 
another author, he were an adept at stringing lords, knights, 
and foreign professors into his list of authorities. 
Although Mr. McIntosh does not appear to have paid any 
attention to my recommendation to read “ Cuming.” I have 
looked up his authority—namely Mr. Strangeways, in the 
Veterinarian , of April last. The cases referred to by Mr. 
Strangeways are very different from those mentioned by Mr. 
McIntosh. The disease described by the former occurs 
towards the end of June, July, or August, and is believed to 
arise from the grass being then dry and indigestible and 
probably bearing seed. That described by the other oc¬ 
curred in the middle of May, when the grasses are succulent 
and very digestible. Mr. McIntosh admits that the grass in 
the rumen was “ half shot,” the stage above all others when 
ruminants thrive best upon it. I believe Mr. Strangeways 
to be right in calling the subject of his paper acute dyspepsia. 
