In the course of last year, there were sold in Smithfield Market, the enormous number of two hundred and thirty-six thousand cattle; and one million, four hundred and seventeen thousand sheep. A practical authority has curiously calculated the number of serious and extensive bruises, caused by sheer brutality, rather than any accidents, in the course of a year. He finds that the amount could not be less than five hundred and twelve thousand. These are only the body-bruises, and do not include any of the various cruelties of blows and cuts on the nose, hocks, horns, tails, ears, legs, &c. Of course, this fevered and bruised flesh rapidly decomposes, and is no longer fit for human food. The flesh of many an animal out of Smithfield, killed on Monday, has become diseased meat by Tuesday evening—a fact too well known. The loss on bruised meat in the year has been calculated, by a practical man, at three shillings a head on every bullock, and sixpence on every sheep, making a total loss of Sixty-Three Thousand Pounds per annum. This loss, it is to be understood, is independent of the quantity of bruised and diseased meat, which _ought_ to be lost, but is sold at various markets, as human food. It is also independent of the numbers of diseased calves and pigs brought to market every week, and sold. Very much of this diseased meat is sold publicly—in Newgate Market, and Tyler’s Market more especially—and at any rate there is a special and regular trade carried on in it. One soup establishment, for the working classes, is said to carry on a business amounting to between four hundred and five hundred pounds weekly, in diseased meat. It is also used by sausage, polony, and saveloy makers; for meat pies, and a-la-mode beef shops; and is very extensively by many of the concocters of preserved meats for home and foreign consumption. It is said that one of the Arctic Expeditions failed, chiefly, in consequence of the preserved meats failing them. They would not keep. Is it any wonder that they would not keep? What they were made of—wholly, or in part—has been sufficiently shown. “In Newgate Market,” says the writer previously quoted, “the most disgraceful trade is carried on in diseased meat; as a proof of which, we assert that one person has been known to purchase from one hundred and twenty, to one hundred and thirty diseased carcases of beasts weekly; and when it is known that there are from twenty to thirty persons, at the least, engaged in this nefarious practice in this market alone, some idea may be formed of its extent.