of the animal, where the best flesh always is.  If the shoulder-point is covered, and feels soft like the point of the hook-bone, it is good, and indicates a well filled neck-vein, which runs from that point to the side of the head.  The shoulder-point, however, is often bare and prominent.  When the neck-vein is so firmly filled up as not to permit the points of the fingers inside of the shoulder-point, this indicates a well tallowed animal; as also does the filling up between the brisket and inside of the fore legs, as well as a full, projecting, well covered brisket in front.  When the flesh comes down heavy upon the thighs, making a sort of double thigh, it is called lyary, and indicates a tendency of the flesh to grow on the lower instead of the upper part of the body.  These are all the points that require touching when the hand is used; and in a high-conditioned ox, they may be gone over very rapidly.”—­Vol. ii. p. 165.

The treatment of horses follows that of cattle, and this chapter is fitted to be of extensive use among our practical farmers.  There are few subjects to which the attention of our small farmers requires more to be drawn than to the treatment of their horses—­few in which want of skill causes a more general and constant waste.  The economy of prepared food is ably treated of, and we select the following passage as containing at once sound theoretical and important practical truths: 

“It appears at first sight somewhat surprising that the idea of preparing food for farm-horses should only have been recently acted on; but I have no doubt that the practice of the turf and of the road, of maintaining horses on large quantities of oats and dry ryegrass hay, has had a powerful influence in retaining it on farms.  But now that a more natural treatment has been adopted by the owners of horses on fast work, farmers, having now the example of post-horses standing their work well on prepared food, should easily be persuaded that, on slow work, the same sort of food should have even a more salutary effect on their horses.  How prevalent was the notion, at one time, that horses could not be expected to do work at all, unless there was hard meat in them!  ’This is a very silly and erroneous idea, if we inquire into it,’ as Professor Dick truly observes, ’for whatever may be the consistency of the food when taken into the stomach, it must, before the body can possibly derive any substantial support or benefit from it, be converted into chyme—­a pultacious mass; and this, as it passes onward from the stomach into the intestinal canal, is rendered still more fluid by the admixture of the secretions from the stomach, the liver, and the pancreas, when it becomes of a milky appearance, and is called chyle.  It is then taken into the system by the lacteals, and in this fluid, this soft state—­and in this state only—­mixes with the blood, and passes through the circulating vessels for the