neficial, and even puncture of the eyeball, but these
should be reserved for professional hands.

The diet throughout should be easily digestible and moderate in
quantity--bran mash, middlings, grass, steamed hay, etc.

Even after the active inflammation has subsided the atropia lotion
should be continued for several weeks to keep the eye in a state of rest
in its still weak and irritable condition, and during this period the
patient should be kept in semidarkness, or taken out only with a dark
shade over the eye. For the same reason heavy drafts and, rapid paces,
which would cause congestion of the head, should be carefully avoided.

RECURRENT OPHTHALMIA (PERIODIC OPHTHALMIA, OR MOON-BLINDNESS).

This is an inflammatory affection of the interior of the eye, intimately
related to certain soils, climates, and systems, showing a strong
tendency to recur again and again, and usually ending in blindness from
cataract or other serious injury.

_Causes._--Its causes may be fundamentally attributed to soil. On damp
clays and marshy grounds, on the frequently overflowed river bottoms and
deltas, on the coasts of seas and lakes alternately submerged and
exposed, this disease prevails extensively, and in many instances in
France (Reynal), Belgium, Alsace (Zundel, Miltenberger), Germany, and
England it has very largely decreased under land drainage and improved
methods of culture. Other influences, more or less associated with such
soil, are potent causative factors. Thus damp air and a cloudy, wet
climate, so constantly associated with wet lands, are universally
charged with causing the disease. These act on the animal body to
produce a lymphatic constitution with an excess of connective tissue,
bones, and muscles of coarse, open texture, thick skins, and gummy legs
covered with a profusion of long hair. Hence the heavy horses of Belgium
and southwestern France have suffered severely from the affection, while
high, dry lands adjacent, like Catalonia, in Spain, and Dauphiny,
Provence, and Languedoc; in France, have in the main escaped.

The rank, aqueous fodders grown on such soils are other causes, but
these again are calculated to undermine the character of the nervous and
sanguineous temperament and to superinduce the lymphatic. Other feeds
act by leading to constipation and other disorders of the digestive
organs, thus impairing the general health. Hence in any animal
predisposed to this disease, heating, starchy feeds,