THE VETERINARIAN.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 839, 30 March 1888, Page 19

THE VETERINARIAN.

A. Remarkable Case. MILLERS BEWARE. We take the annexed singular and interestin" report upon a truly novel home disease from the Agricultural Gazette of August last : STONE IN A HOUSE'S STOMACH. I knew of three such cases, which occurred at a neighboring water-mill. Two of these horses I knew as well and saw almost as often as I did our own farm horte3. The first horse 1 knew was a short-backed, shortlegged, good-looking light bay, with four white feet, aud he was very fat from having all the miller’s undressed offal that he liked to eat. But his fat and fie-.h were flabby, and shook as he moved, as is the case when an animal is mainly fed on wheaten oflal ns it comes from the flour-separating cylinder, and no beans Oi other nitrogenous substances —linseed is the correct antidote—arc added. This horse dropped dead in the shafts of a cart in a lane crossing our farm when within two or three hundred yards of his stable at the mill. He had been doing a twp miles’ journey out and home, witn a light load there, at the slowest possible walk or a snail’s pace, which was his driver’s proverbial rate of movement—so that it was not over exertion that was the eause of his sudden death. He had in his stomach a round ball, about 12 inches in circumference, the surface of which was covered with prettily arranged convolutions, the indentures being from onesixteenth to one-eighth of an inch in depth. —The next horse that died prematurely from this cause was a more leggy dark wholecolored bay. He had three stones in his stomach, but these were more of a lemon than an orange shape, and they were quite smooth. Both the oblong formation and the smoothness of them were, no doubt, clue to the way thc-y chaffed or fretted each other in the horse’s stomach when he moved during work on tho road. He died in his stable after a short painful illness from inflammation caused by the stones. I forget the weight of the three, bub I think it was 1141 b. At aDy rate, as I see them in my mind’s eye now, they must have weighed 101 b or 121 b. The first;ball 1 saw was kept on the mantelpiece in my father’s sitting-room, and shown by him to visitors as a curiosity and a marvel. So the disease —if it may he so termed —was not common in that neighbor hood at that time. But when the second ball appeared a few days later, the village surgeon, who had just obtained his diploma, and superseded one of the old style of bloodletters aud bone-setters, soon explained the cause. This was that the grit which was worn off the millstones by friction, although very fine aud heavier than the flour, did not pass through the silk of the revolving cylinder, but was left hack to pass away with the offal. Everyone knows that millstones do thus give off grit when in use, or their grooves would not need deepening and their edges sharpening by steel dressing « bills,’ It is this grit that -probably aided by the glutinous matter of the food in the stomach is formed into these stono balls. The first horse that died—tho one out of which the ‘curiosity’ hall came—l knew nothing-of, for that hall was oue of the first tilings'! had given me to play with by rolling it and running after it on the carpet. But it was round, even rather flatter at two opposite sides like an orange, and the convolutions were larger and deeper more like parts of the brain of an animal —then was the surface of the one that came out of the first horse mentioned. I sawed this stone through twenty years or so later, and it waß through out perfectly clear solid stone, so much so that, so far as I remember, there was not a speck in the centre where the first few grains of grit formed themselves into the nucleus around which the stone of 51b or bib weight in time gathered. So far as a remedy goes, there is, of course, not one ; for the solvent required to reduce such a stone to its natural elements would dissolve the horse’s inside long before any imuression was made on the mineral substance so formed. But the preventive means arc to give a horse.no mote miller’s offal than he can easily digest and pass away, and to aid this —and keep up the animal’B working powers at the same time - to add to that quantity a good allowance oi ground linseed, or linseed-cake with a goon percentage of oil leifc in it. —W.W.G., Ju y 19th. •