When the skull above the eye is very thin, the disease may be at once ended by cautiously thrusting a short, stout, sharp-pointed piece of steel wire through the skin and bone down towards the centre of the brain, taking care to pull the skin a little to one side before making the puncture, so that on letting it loose the openings in the skull and integument will not be opposite to one another. This plan is much superior to that of thrusting a needle up the nostril, in the manner devised by Mr Hogg, as in his way we are always poking in the dark, in ignorance of the situation of the instrument, and are in all probability doing so much injury to the delicate parts within the nose as to preclude the possibility of recovery. Indeed, I some time ago examined a head on which Mr Hogg's operation had been twice unsuccessfully performed, and found traces of inflammation at the upper part of the nostril severe enough of itself to have occasioned death. The needle had not entered the brain, but the ethmoid was very much injured. I believe the instrument is very seldom pushed more than half way through the bone, at least it never reaches the hydatid, which would appear to be destroyed rather by the inflammatory process which follows the attempt, unfitting the brain for supplying it with the secretions on which it lives, than by any direct injury done to it by the needle. CHAPTER VII. DISEASES OF SHEEP. (119.) There is no department in the management of sheep so little understood as the nature and treatment of their diseases. Every part of the sheep itself has been used, at one time or another, in this country, as medicine for _man_, a folly still prevailing among the boors of Southern Africa, who, according to Thunberg, employ the inner coat of the stomach, dried and powdered, as a safe emetic. Quackish absurdities of so glaring a nature have, however, long been scorned in civilized society. Not so, however, when the sheep is the object of treatment. Scientific innovations have been slow in reaching it, and specimens of barbarian usage are far from rare. We may feel for the benighted credulity which could place reliance, for a rescue from mortal ailment, on the secretions or excretions of a sheep; but we are compelled to laugh on reading, in the _Family Dictionary_, published in 1752, the following:-- "In general, 'tis affirmed that the belly of a sheep boiled in water and wine, and given the sheep to drink, cures several diseases incident to them."