PRACTICAL PAPERS—ABORTION IN COWS. 
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by the placenta— hy ike first practice the uterine reproductive 
apparatus is weakened^ and liahility to abortion established; and 
by the second^ the natural supply of bloody which should go during 
pregnancy to the uterus to nourish the foetus^ is continued to be drawn 
in the other direction towards the mammary gland^ arrest of devel¬ 
opment from inanition is endangered^ and when it occurs^ the 
foetus is expelled as a foreign body. 
Now, it is respectfully submitted, that the reports to this com¬ 
mission from the dairy districts of New York, and to a more 
limited extent those in Massachusetts, during the last two 
years, show an habitual violation of both the laws governing 
the time at which the reproductive process should begin, and 
those regulating the nourishment of the foetus-in-utero. 
In the first place^ in the year 1867, from the reports of 1,453 
farms, it appears that on 1,047, or 72 per cent, of farms, the 
habit is to impregnate the heifers at from one to one’ and a 
half years of age. The reports of this year state that out of 
11,549 cows raised by the farmers reporting them, 9,591, or 
83 per cent, of cows, tirst calved at under three years of age. 
If an animal be allowed to bear young much before it has 
arrived at maturity, the process of reproduction being essentially 
antagonistic to that of nutrition^ must interfere to a greater or 
less degree with its full growth, which of course depends 
upon its nutrition. An animal cannot be said to have 
arrived at maturity, simply because it is able to be fecundated ; 
the phenomenon of ovulation, or heat, is but a part of the 
reproductive process ; for the successful carrying out of the 
whole, the rest of the animal system should have acquired 
strength of constitution and vigor, sufficient to bear the tax of 
having a part of its nutritive material taken by the foetus, and 
this requires that nearly the full growth of its organs should 
be attained. 
Now, a heifer at two years old is not full grown, and yet it 
is shown that 83 per cent, of those raised in the districts 
where abortions prevail, have'been, for from the six to nine 
months pre-ieding this age, subjected to a process in opposition 
to that of growth. And although it cannot be said that any 
