one person in the grinding of wheat served but to supply
the wants of twenty others. In both cases machinery was employed
for reducing the grain to flour; but in the one case, the mechanisms
employed were more than a hundred times more effective than in the
other. But even the most imperfect flour mill is by far a more
economical system of comminuting corn than the jaws of animals; and if
every man were obliged, as the horse is, to grind his corn by means of
his teeth alone, he would find his powers for the performance of other
kinds of labor considerably lessened.

It has been urged as an objection to the use of bruised oats by horses,
that they exercise in that state a laxative influence upon the animal's
bowels. I doubt very much that such is frequently the case, when the
animal is fed only upon oats and hay and straw; but even if the oats
produce such an effect, the addition of a small proportion of beans--the
binding properties of which are well known--will obviate the
disadvantage.

The desirability of mechanically acting upon soft food is not so
apparent as the necessity for the bruising of oats is. Roots are so
easily masticable that if they are rendered more so there is danger of
their being so hastily swallowed as to escape thorough insalivation,
which is so necessary to ensure perfect digestion. To guard against this
danger, perhaps the best way would be to give pulped mangels and turnips
mixed with cut straw; a mixture which could not easily be bolted.
Mr. Charles Lawrence, of Cirencester, who is a great advocate for the
cooking of food, and has frequently published his experience of the
benefits derivable therefrom, thus describes his method of combining
pulped roots with dry fodder:--

We find that, taking a score of bullocks together fattening,
they consume per head per diem three bushels of chaff, mixed
with just half a cwt. of pulped roots, exclusive of cakes of
corn; that is to say, rather more than two bushels of chaff
are mixed with the roots, and given at two feeds, morning and
evening, and the remainder is given with the cake, &c., at the
middle-day feed, thus:--We use the steaming apparatus of Stanley,
of Peterborough, consisting of a boiler in the centre, in which
the steam is generated, and which is connected by a pipe on the
left hand with a large galvanised iron receptacle for steaming
food for pigs, and on the right with a large wooden tub, line