33(5 
NEWS AND SUNDRIES. 
tions by scientists show this to be the only safe and common 
sense disposition of the carcasses of animals perishing from hog 
cholera, Texas fever, pleuro-pnemnonia, glanders and the like. A 
case illustrative is in the discovery recently made by Dr. Freire, 
of Rio Janeiro. In examining the earth where the victims of 
yellow fever had been interred the.year before, he found “ myri¬ 
ads of microbii, exactly identical with those found in the vomit¬ 
ings of persons sick with yellow fever.” These germs he has 
cultivated, and has reproduced the disease in animals, whose 
blood after death he found to be filled with the seeds of yellow 
fever in various stages of growth. If our farmers will act upon 
this suggestion to burn the bodies of animals that die of disease, 
in any form, they will save the lives of thousands of valuable 
stock .—Prairie Farmer. 
Ayena Saliva*— A French veterinary surgeon, M. A. Sanson, 
has recently communicated to the Paris Academy a very inter¬ 
esting note upon a new active principle which he has discovered 
in the seed of the oat, to which this grain evidently owes its 
stimulant or exciting action. The peculiar property has been, 
turn and turn about, asserted aud denied, though the idea has 
been popular both in England and France for a long time. Pro¬ 
fessor Sanson determined to decide the matter by direct experi¬ 
ments carried out at the Agricultural School at Grignon. He 
undertook to solve the problem bytesting the action of oats upon 
the nervo-muscular excitability of the horse, but has effected this 
by means of the graduated current of the electric apparatus of 
Du Bois Raymond, the instrument being used before and after 
a feed of oats. In this manner the author has arrived at the 
conclusion (after a considerable number of experiments) that oats 
really possessed a very remarkable exciting action, and the next 
thing to be done was to ascertain to what principle they owed 
this property. The author found that the pericarp, or envelope 
of the seed, contained a substance which is soluble in alcohol, 
and which possesses the properly of exciting the motor cells of 
the nervous system. This substance, the existence of which has 
been suspected by some and denied by others, is not vaseilline, 
as certain writers have pretended, nor any odoriferous and stim- 
