MANUFACTURED FOODS FOR AGRICULTURAL STOCK. 91 
food for stock. It would continue to be produced if the 
farmer did not so employ it. Its price as food is not 
regulated so much by the cost of production, as by what 
the farmer will give for it in competition with other articles. 
Tt may be mentioned, however, that many of the recently 
introduced manufactured foods cost four or five times as 
much, weight for weight, as our most nutritive oilcakes. 
From all that has been said, it will be clear that these 
newly manufactured foods cannot snbstitute any of the 
necessary constituents contained in our ordinary stock foods 
anv further than they themselves supply them. So far as 
the mere supply of alimentary constituents is concerned, 
a mixture of linseed or oilcake, and corn-meal, can provide 
these at one fourth to one fifth the cost of the specially-made 
artificial foods. Such foods cannot, therefore, be relied upon 
as staple articles. The virtues which they really do possess 
over and above those which could be secured at one fourth 
to one fifth the price are confined, therefore, to the action 
on the health and digestion of the animals of the small 
amount of stimulating and carminative seeds which they 
contain. In fact, so far, they are sauce or medicine, rather 
than food. As such they are likely rather to increase than 
diminish the appetite for further nutriment. Still it is quite 
possible that, if judiciously compounded, they may be of 
service in keeping horses in a more healthy state of body, 
or in aiding the digestive powers of weakly animals which 
do not readily consume and thrive upon the ordinary foods. 
It should, however, be clearly understood by the farmer, 
that these manufactured foods cannot do away with the 
necessity for a given amount of digestible and assimilable 
constituents in the collaterally consumed ordinary food. 
There is, as yet, no exact evidence to show that they can, 
even in their office of condiments or medicines, enable the 
animals profitably to appropriate a larger proportion than 
they otherwise would of the constituents of the other food 
they consume. That is to say, there is no proof afforded, 
that with their use there is either a larger amount of increase 
obtained for a given amount of food-constituents consumed, 
or that a smaller amount of the food-constituents passes off 
unused and effete in the faeces. 
Below are given the results of the practical trial of the 
food, the proximate analysis of which has been already 
recorded. The plan of the experiment was as follows: six 
pigs were selected and divided into two lots of three each, 
the collective weights of the respective lots differing from 
one another by only 2 lbs. To lot No. 1 a mixture was 
