"Do we not here perceive, so to express ourselves, the evil enter and depart through the skin?
"M. Roche-Lubin gives an account of some lambs which were exposed, after being shorn, to a humid icy cold succeeding upon summer heat. These animals all died; and their post mortem examination disclosed nothing further than a blackened condition of blood throughout the whole circulating system, with stagnation in some organs, such as the liver, the spleen, or abdominal vascular system.
"From the foregoing disclosures, which might be multiplied if there was need of it, we learn that the regularity or perversion of the functions of the skin exercises an all-powerful influence over the conservation or derangement of the health, and that very many diseases can be traced to no other origin than the interruption, more or less, of these functions."
These remarks are valuable, inasmuch as they go to prove the importance, in the treatment of disease, of a restoration of the lost function. Our system of applying friction, warmth, and moisture to the external surface, in all cases of internal disease, here finds, in the authors just quoted, able advocates.
FOOTNOTES:
[14] What a destructive system, then, must blood-letting be, which proposes to supply this deficiency in the empty vessels by opening a vein and suffering the contents of the overcharged vessels to fall to the ground! If the blood abstracted from the full veins could be returned into those "empty" ones, then there would be some sense in blood-letting.
SPAYING COWS.
The castration of cows has been practised for several years in different parts of the world, with such remarkable success, that no one will doubt there are advantages to be derived from it. For the benefit of those who may have doubts on this subject, we give the opinions of a committee appointed by the Rheims Academy to investigate the matter.
"To the question put to the committee—