over-ripe fruit, and weak new beer or other liquors avoided as much as possible. The bowels should be kept regular, but not open, by the occasional use of mild aperients, as rhubarb, aloes, castor oil, senna, or mercurial pill, or compounds containing them. Excessive looseness or diarrhœa may be checked by a few doses of carbonate of soda, chalk-mixture, or astringents.
In INFANCY this affection is usually accompanied by restlessness, continual crying, drawing up of the legs forcibly towards the body, hiccups, vomiting, diarrhœa, sour eructations, griping pains, green stools, and debility; often followed, when the irritation is considerable, by convulsions. The treatment consists in relieving the bowels of all offending matter by a few doses of rhubarb-and-magnesia. The looseness or diarrhœa may be checked by a few small doses of carbonate of soda or chalk mixture; or better, in an infant which is fed by lime-water (1 or 2 fl. oz.) mixed with as much milk. Two or three drops of caraway, cinnamon, dill, or peppermint water, on sugar (not with the food) will tend to promote the expulsion, and prevent the undue generation of gases. The flatulence usually disappears with the acidity. The occasional administration of 1 to 3 gr. of quicksilver-with-chalk (‘grey powder’), will frequently remove the complaint, and prevent its recurrence, when all other means fail. The diet of both nurse and infant should be carefully regulated.
See Antacids, Dyspepsia, &c.
Treatment for Horses. Alkalies, their carbonates and bicarbonates; alterative doses of aloes with alkalies; chalk, carbonate of magnesia; mineral acids; bismuth, arsenic, nux vomica, or strychnia.
ACIDS, EFFECTS OF, ON VEGETATION. This subject has been ably investigated of recent years by Dr Angus Smith and Mr Rothwell, and the practical importance of their labours is shown by the circumstance that an Act of Parliament passed in 1875 renders it penal for the proprietors of alkali works to condense not less than 95 per cent. of the hydrochloric acid evolved in the process of manufacturing ‘soda,’ also to allow air, smoke, or chimney gases to escape into the atmosphere containing more than one fifth of a grain of hydrochloric acid per cubic foot. Every owner of an alkali work is likewise required to ‘use the best practical means of preventing the discharge into the atmosphere of all other noxious gases arising from such work, or of rendering such gases harmless when discharged.’
The injurious effects of acids on vegetation are indicated chiefly by the shrivelled-up appearance which the leaves of herbage, trees, &c., exhibit in the vicinity of chemical works in which the condensation of noxious gases (hydrochloric acid, sulphurous acid, sulphuric acid, sulphuretted hydrogen, nitric acid, and oxides of nitrogen and chlorine) is not effectually carried out. According to Mr Rothwell, ‘in fields exposed to acid vapours handfuls of dead grass may be pulled up in the spring, smelling strongly of the vapour, and that trees, under similar influences, become bark-bound.’
The following is a list of trees arranged in the order of their susceptibility. (Rothwell.)
Forest Trees. Larch, spruce fir, Scotch fir, black Italian poplar, Lombardy poplar, ash, oak, elm, birch, alder, sycamore.
Fruit Trees. Damson, greengage, Halewood plum, Jacob plum, pears, apples, cherries.
Shrubs, Evergreens, and Wild Plants. British laurels, Portugal laurels, Aucuba Japonica, Barberry evergreen, hazel, guelder rose, sloe thorn, hawthorn, raspberries, gooseberries, blackberries, gorse, hollies.