DIGESTION EXPERIMENTS. 
By F. E. EMERY, Agriculturist, and B. W. KILGORE, First Ass’t Chemist. 
I. DIGESTIBILITY OF COTTON SEED HULLS. 
In feeding experiments heretofore conducted at this Station and else¬ 
where with cotton seed hulls, the digestibility has been assumed to be 
equal to that of wheat straw in the several nutritive constituents which 
make a fodder valuable. Where this by-product is produced in large 
quantities it becomes of importance to cotton farmers and stock feeders 
to know something more definite in regard to its value for cattle food. 
There have already been feeding experiments enough made with cotton 
seed hulls at Southern Experiment Stations, and on a commercial scale 
by gentlemen who are interested in disposing of this by-product, to show 
that it can be used profitably with cotton seed meal or other grain ia the 
production of fat cattle. 
It yet remained to determine the digestibility of the hulls as fed sep¬ 
arately for maintenance, and in a ration with meal as used for fattening 
in order to give us some other than empirical means for compounding 
rations, and to put the feeding of cotton seed hulls on the same rational 
basis as has been established for so many other cattle foods. 
It was expected that a first digestion on some other food would have 
to be made and the hulls added to it, but a Jersey cow with a good ap¬ 
petite, one that kept habitually in good order on a rather poor diet, gave 
the means of making a direct determination. After the digestibility of 
the cotton seed hulls alone had been determined, cotton seed meal was 
added and a determination made of the digestibility of the ration thus 
made. 
Since no digestion work has been done before at this Station it may be 
well to enter somewhat into the details and show, for those readers who 
are not familiar with the work, how a digestion experiment is made. 
The animal selected for the experiment is fed a known uniform amount 
of the food, the digestibility of which is to be determined for at least six 
days before the real work begins. The food actually eaten is found by 
weighing that fed, weighing and drying waste, and subtracting dry mat¬ 
ter of waste from dry matter of food fed. The solid excrement is col¬ 
lected and analyzed, and the constituents subtracted from the correspond¬ 
ing ones in the food eaten ; the difference is the amount digested less a 
small amount which comes from bile compounds and wear and tear of 
the digestive track. This error can be nearly corrected by dissolving 
