Appetite is usually lost, or, more properly, the animal no longer takes notice of surrounding things, not even of its food. In some cases, however, in which stupor or coma is not extreme the animal will eat a little during his quiescent intervals. In ryegrass and other dietetic poisoning, the animal may still eat and fall asleep with the month full. The digestion is impaired or suspended, the bowels costive, and fermentations with tympanies and rumbling are frequent complications. When originating from poisonous food this often contributes to these abdominal complications. Respirations in the comatose condition are deep and slow, sometimes not more than four or five per minute. The heart usually beats strongly, often tumultuously, and the pulse varies greatly—infrequent or frequent, strong or weak, full or small. With cerebritis it is often abnormally slow. Hyperthermia is always present to a greater or less extent, being often more marked in the more violent forms or those in which meningitis appears to predominate than in the purely cerebral forms. The temperature may vary from 101° to 106°. The optic disc is congested. Probably in all cases or nearly all there is a preliminary stage of excitement, in which the eye is clear, the eyelids open, the aspect alert and the whole skin affected by a marked hyperæsthesia. In some cases the symptoms of excitement are much more violent at the outset of the disease, as marked by trembling, nervous movements, pawing, pushing the head against the wall while the motions of walking or trotting are performed by the limbs, or those of plunging forward, rearing up, drawing back on the halter, etc. But even when the disease seems to have started with stupor and coma, these paroxysms of excitement almost invariably appear at intervals as it advances. Some, however, plunged in stupor or coma at the first, remain in this condition until they end in paralysis or death, or start in convalescence.