The same result may follow from a different process. The saline matter may not be taken up, even when the soil is rich in such ingredients, from the functional derangement into which the roots or digestive organs have been thrown by the unnatural circumstances in which it has been placed. A plant is composed, like all organized bodies, of a certain number of proximate principles, which are more or less numerous in different kinds. These are combined with varying quantities of potass, soda, lime, magnesia, and iron, which, though formerly supposed to be too trifling in quantity materially to affect the quality of the plant, have yet been recently and satisfactorily proved completely to change the character of the compound, even when the excess or deficiency amounts only to a 1/10000th part so that, supposing an animal to thrive on plants which contain salts of any or all of the above bodies, it will soon fall off if these plants are in any way deprived of a single adjunct; for by the removal of that one salt, their nature has been entirely altered. The certainty and rapidity with which Bakewell could rot his sheep, by pasturing them, in Autumn, on land over which water had been allowed to flow during the previous summer, may seem to controvert what I have above stated, as to time and frequent change of pasture often intervening between the origin of the disease, and its termination; but when it is recollected that he pursued the destructive system of breeding _in_ and _in_, of itself sufficient to induce a tuberculous predisposition, the reader will perceive that his sheep were, in all likelihood, more or less tainted, and therefore, sure to fall victims to the disease the moment they were subjected to the deleterious influence of an unwholesome pasture.[39] [39] When parcels of Mr Bakewell's best sheep became, from any defect, unserviceable to him, he used to fatten them for the butcher. But as there was a _probability_ of their becoming valuable in other hands, he always gave them the rot before he sold them! An example, which, I hope, for the sake both of man and sheep, never to see followed.