ANCIENT VETERINARY PRACTICE. 
837 
perature was high and the ventilation defective. This can 
be remedied by having perforated trays filled with chloride 
of calcium, or some other substance having an affinity for 
water, placed here and there on the deck. 
Water ought to be supplied to the animals twice or even 
thrice a day in summer. Care should likewise he taken to 
have the manger suspended or attached to upper front har. 
Odourless disinfectants should be used. 
These things are what I should propose for a horse- 
transport service, but they are not usually furnished. In 
war time everything is so hurried, ships of every conceivable 
build are chartered, and men frequently fit them up who have 
not the remotest idea of what is needed. 
When ships are particularly employed in regularly carrying 
animals, everything ought to be simple, effective, humane, 
and profitable. 
Sheep should be carried in pens containing only a limited 
number. Racks and water-troughs should be fixed around 
these, near to, but not on the deck. 
With sheep, and no doubt also with cattle and horses, 
I think it would be an excellent plan to make them stand 
on wooden gratings raised an inch or two from the deck. 
Through this the urine and faeces would pass, the feet would 
be kept clean, the animals would not slip so readily, and the 
ship could be more easily purified and the decks flushed with 
water. It would, I am certain, be a great improvement, par¬ 
ticularly if gutters to receive the fluid manure were made 
in the deck and led to the scupper-holes, where fluid could 
be discharged into the sea. 
The embarking and disembarking of cattle and sheep is, 
I suppose, already as perfect as it can be. With horses these 
are sometimes most important operations, and are not always 
well conducted. 
ANCIENT VETERINARY PRACTICE. 
By R. H. Dyer, M.R.C.Y.S. 
The work from which these extracts are taken was pub¬ 
lished about two centuries ago, which would warrant the 
supposition that it is not in the hands of many members of the 
profession, i^dthough ‘ Markham’s Masterpiece’ was com¬ 
mented upon by me some time since (in what has been deemed 
sarcastic criticism, when speaking of laminitis), it was not 
