126 
EDITORIAL OBSERVATIONS. 
In a subsequent number of the Leader Dr. Howe enters 
upon the question as to whether the meat of rot-affected 
sheep is or is not wholesome as human food. He writes 
thus—“As my long experience and observations may throw 
some light on this all-important branch of the subject I 
have to ask a further space in your columns. The thought 
that we are consuming the flesh of animals in whose viscera 
hosts of crawling things have been living is doubtless un¬ 
pleasant enough, but a little reflection that nearly every 
kind of flesh, fowl, fish, or vegetable that we consume is 
subject to the same abnormal condition under some form or 
other should tend to dispel the feeling ; the knowledge only 
of the fact produces the disgust of the consumer. If we 
were to reject every article of food for such a reason we 
should indeed have very little left to live on. There is not 
an animal, bird, fish, or even vegetable, and some of the 
most disgusting character, that has not its peculiar parasite, 
sc a life living on its life.” It is only when its own health 
suffers from the ravages of its disagreeable lodgers that it 
becomes unfit for human food. The fluke of the sheep and 
cattle, the worm of the hare and rabbit, the inhabitants of 
the viscera of the duck and all species of wild fowl, the 
aphis of the cabbage plant, the rust of wheat, the oidium of 
the vine, and the mistletoe of the oak, are all of the same 
category, and it is not until they begin to sap the health of 
their victim, and change the structure of its organic life, 
which in most instances is long after the period of their 
invasion, that they render it valueless for the purposes of 
man. The only effect of flukes when they first take [up 
their abode in the liver ducts of the sheep is to produce 
torpidity, a kind of lethargic inactivity, an aversion to rapid 
motion, especially up hill ; the consequence of this state is 
a great disposition to fatten, exactly the same condition that 
is produced in stall-fed oxen and geese when put up to fatten 
in darkness and close confinement—the liver becomes con¬ 
gested and is enlarged, and in point of fact there is no more 
organic disease in the one case than in the other. Practi¬ 
cally graziers in Europe are so w r ell acquainted with this 
fact that sheep are brought in large numbers annually from 
the high lands to graze in fluky pastures, for the purpose of 
