479 
Extracts from British and Foreign Journals. 
DISEASES OE SHEEP. 
(Paper read at the British Pharmaceutical Conference.) 
By "VP. W. Stoddart. 
At the end of the year 1877 a fanner residing in the 
neighbourhood of Bristol requested me to investigate the 
death of some sheep which had taken place every autumn 
without any assignable cause, so much so that a heavy loss 
was annually incurred. Many visits were consequently paid 
to the farm for the purpose of finding out the cause of 
disease. I noticed that the sheep were fed only on the 
natural herbage grown on the spot. It consisted of two 
kinds of clover, the ordinary Dutch (Trfolium repens, L.), 
and the common purple (T. pratense, L.). With these were 
the ray grass (Lolium perenne , L.), or, as it is commonly but 
erroneously spelled, (e rye ” grass. A strict inquiry being 
made as to the symptoms, the farmer informed me that they 
were always the same and generally supervened in the 
month of August, when this very peculiar illness on the farm 
became prevalent. It took the form of dysentery, inflamma¬ 
tion of the bowels, diarrhoea, the evacuations resembling 
coffee grounds, afterwards succeeded by exhaustion, collapse, 
and death. 
Analyses of water and the soil were made for the purpose 
of detecting any deleterious metal or other irritant poison. 
No satisfactory result followed, and the cause of illness 
seemed to be mysterious and inexplicable. At length I 
heard that the ewes sometimes slipped their young, which 
gave a remote suspicion that the cause of all might be due 
to ergotism. An inquiry was then made as to the presence 
of gangrene, when the unexpected but significant remark 
was made that, although the farm was on a dry, porous, sandy 
slope, yet the sheep always had the “ foot rot,” even in the 
summer, which defied all the remedies that usually proved 
effectual. With this idea in my mind, and while watching 
the lambs feeding, I noticed that they avoided the old 
mature plants, while they greedily devoured the young green 
ones. 
On examining more minutely the former, I noticed several 
well-formed, purplish, dark-coloured ergots were projecting 
from the paleae, but could not discover a single specimen on 
