A kind of apoplexy is sometimes produced by the presence of undigested food in the stomach. In this country the disease is not common, and there is nothing like it when the food ferments. Obstinate constipation, and sometimes complete obstruction of the bowels, are the occasional results of indigestion.

The Process of Fermentation must be familiar to almost everybody. Grain, or other vegetable matter, when thrown into a heap, moistened, and heated to a certain point, soon undergoes a change. The principal phenomenon attending which is the evolution of air in great abundance, more perhaps than twenty or thirty times the bulk of the articles from which it is extricated. When this process takes place in the stomach, the horse's life is in danger, for he has no power like some other animals to belch up the air. Distension of the stomach and bowels rapidly succeeds, and runs so far as to rupture them. If the stomach or bowels do not give way, life may be destroyed by inflammation or strangulation of the bowels, or the mere pain of distension may produce death before there is time either for rupture, inflairimation, or strangulation. The disease sometimes cures itself, the an not being very abundant, or being evacuated by passing through the bowels; but very often the horse dies in from four to twelve hours. Sometimes he dies in two, and sometimes not till he has been ill for eighteen or twenty-four. The disease goes under various names. In different places it is termed gripes, the batts, fret, colic, flatulent colic, spasmodic colic, enteritis, inflamed bowels, and acute indigestion.

It has been described by only one author with whom I am acquainted, and he speaks of it as a rare disease. All who have written treatises on veterinary medicine, have seen the disease several times, but they mistake it for some other to which they have given names, according to the appearances they have seen on dissecting the horse after death. Thus, one describes the symptoms, and attributes them to inflammation of the bowels; another to spasms of the bowels; a third to strangulation; a fourth to rupture of the diaphragm, and so on, with far too many more. All these, and several others, are the effect of fermentation of the food either in the stomach or in the bowels. The cause has been overlooked, and death traced only to the effects of the cause. The disease which is treated and described by authors and teachers as inflamed Dowels, spasmodic colic, strangulation, ruptured stomach, ruptured diaphragm, is in 136 out of 137 cases, neither more nor less at the beginning than a distension of the stomach and bowels by air. I know this from my own practice, of which, in reference to this disease, I have kept a record during 18 months.

For the sake of brevity in reference, I shall term it.