THE RELATION OF DIET TO DISEASE 455 
fat, fat-vitamine and inorganic salts, especially the 
calcium, are deficient in amount. In the wild, birds vary 
their diet of seeds with insects, worms, soft fruits and the 
tender shoots of plants, and at the same time they increase 
their inorganic intake by the minerals picked up with the 
gravel and from the water which has penetrated the soil. 
Grain and Grass Diet. 
The hay-eating animals constitute a large and well 
studied group — indluding practically ajl the domestic 
varieties. Table 19 shows that these animals yield the 
greatest number of cases of malnutrition, food poisoning, 
acute pancreatitis, acute degenerative conditions of liver 
and myocardium. 
Recent literature describes many cases of osteo- 
malacia, especially among horses and cows, in the famine 
districts of Europe. In our collection of 1,860 post- 
mortems only one case was found, that of an Isabelline 
gazelle {Gazella Isabella), a hay-eating animal, and in this 
case it was secondary to infection. 
Arthritis, occurring in 3.4 per cent, of all the autop- 
sies, was almost entirely confined to the hay-eating 
animals. The literature describes many cases of arthri- 
tis almost entirely confined to ungulates, of which 
many were associated with calving and subsequent infec- 
tion. Bacteriological researches have found it most often 
associated with streptococci, staphylococci, or Bact. per- 
fringens, organisms that require a certain amount of 
carbohydrate for their proper development. The relation 
of diet to this condition probably lies only in the fact that 
it provides an excessive carbohydrate substrate suitable 
for the optimum development of these organisms. Folin 
and Bergland, noting glycoresis in Herbivora, thought that 
it represented the absorption and excretion of unusable 
carbohydrate, present in grains, vegetables, fruits, etc., 
and that it was sharply separated from the main carbo- 
hydrate metabolism. These products were absorbed from 
