New York AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION. 59 
cereal grain except buckwheat, the average percentage in thirty 
samples of American oats being 9.5 per ct. 
In 26 cases out of 34 the fiber content of these mixtures, as 
shown above, is larger than that in average oats and in 16 in- 
stances it ranges between 11.0 and 29.7 per ct. Moreover, a 
majority of these feeds contain quite a proportion of corn, or 
perhaps hominy waste, material, which has a very low fiber con- 
tent, averaging not over 2 per ct. It is clear that a mixture of 
the entire grains of corn and oats which does not carry less fiber 
than the oats, is impossible, and inversely it is equally plain that 
combinations of corn and of oat offals with as large and generally 
much larger, percentage of fiber than is found in pure oats must 
contain more oat hulls than belong with the oat kernels present, 
That this is true of many of these feeding stuff mixtures is shown 
by a mere mechanical examination without resorting to a chem- 
ical analysis. Some of them must contain not less than 50 lbs. 
of oat hulls per hundred pounds. The low proportion of protein 
is also evidence of a convincing character. In 20 out of the 34 
samples, the protein content is below what would ever be the case 
with a mixture of whole corn and oats, a condition which is 
brought about by the small proportion of protein in the oat hulls 
present. | 
In certain brands an amount of some highly nitrogenous feeding 
stuff like cotton-seed meal or gluten meal is found, the object of 
its use being to bring up the protein content to the standard of 
wheat bran. This certainly improves the feed, but at the same 
time the presence of high quality ingredients adds nothing to the 
value of the inferior constituents. Grinding corn with oat hulls, 
for instance, may not injure the corn but it does not improve the 
hulls. They are still hulls and retain all their characteristics as 
a feeding stuff. 
In order to ascertain the effect upon digestibility of introducing 
oat feed into a feeding stuff mixture, an experiment has been con- 
ducted at this Station with sheep, using as the experimental feed- 
