758 
W. H. DALRYMPLE. 
Changes are now, I am glad to say, gradually coming about 
for the better. The spirit of inquiry is taking hold of our 
more progressive stock-owners. Information is anxiously sought 
after with regard to the nutritive value of the various food¬ 
stuffs, nutritive rations, properly balanced rations, etc. On 
many plantations the feeding—during hard-working seasons— 
of the best and heaviest oats that can be procured, in which the 
necessary nutritious principles exist in the best balanced condi¬ 
tion, is supplanting the system of exclusive corn-feeding, with 
its excessive heat and fat producing properties in proportion to 
its albumenoid or muscle-forming elements. The purest obtain¬ 
able water-supply is being procured either from deep wells or 
through pumps from the vast waters of the Mississippi River, 
* instead of from shallow wells, generally situated at the lowest 
portion of the stable lot, and being contaminated by seepage 
from the surface. The systematic feeding and watering of stock 
is becoming to be looked upon as a necessity for the mainte¬ 
nance of health and the prevention of disease. And so, where 
ignorance and carelessness once largely predominated, intelli¬ 
gence in a great measure now prevails. Although no State in 
the Union, I suppose, could produce relatively such an abun¬ 
dance of luxuriant native and other grasses as Louisiana, it 
seems paradoxical to state that we have to depend largely on the 
West for our hay supply, some of which is of such an inferior 
quality that I am convinced it would not be bought for food in 
any other market in the country except the South. Of course, 
as education in the science of feeding progresses with us, other 
markets than the South will have to be found for inferior 
articles of stock food. 
From such causes we frequently get diseases of a myotic na¬ 
ture. A few months ago I was called to investigate the cause of 
a disease among a levee contractor’s mules that were at work 
repairing the levee or banks of a section of the Mississippi River. 
I found thirty-eight of the animals in hospitals suffering from 
parasitic stomatitis, with extensive ulceration and denudation 
of the mucous membrane of the under surface of the tongue and 
