It may probably provoke a laugh among gentlemen and horsemen to read of toothache in the horse. Few, very few grooms may have witnessed or have noticed such a disease, but the fact exists; it is, indeed, a cruel reality to the animal which experiences it. The ignorance of stable men can establish nothing, for they are, as a class, equally presumptuous and ignorant; they have seen the horse for years, and yet are acquainted with neither the natural ailments nor the proper treatment of the animal. The toothache is to the creature a most agonizing disorder. We have only to look at the healthy horse, to observe how exquisitely it is clothed, how finely it is framed, to imagine how sensitive must be the body. The horse seems capable of a fear the most cowardly of mankind never conceived. So its face, though not made for expression, can denote an anguish which the human mind fortunately has no capacity to picture. The eye is often painful in its speaking. It embodies a desperation, a weariness of the world, and a prayer for death, such as few people comprehend; or the cry would rise, from the length and breadth of the land, demanding, as with one voice, the more Christian treatment of man's fellow-creature. SCALD MOUTH. This is an accident which occasionally occurs where grooms are too ignorant, or too thoughtless to read the direction labeled upon every bottle sent into the stable. Potent fluids are sometimes transmitted pure, in small bottles, though the custom is highly reprehensible; nor is the practice bettered because the label orders the contents to be mixed with water before the medicine is administered to the horse. Grooms are generally careless, and proverbially in a hurry; one of them enters the stable to give the drench, sees the bottle, seizes it in haste, calls the helper nearest the stable door, and, with such assistance, pours the liquid fire down the animal's throat. The mouth is by the potent drug deprived of its lining membrane, and the stomach is lastingly injured; even if the dose be too small to occasion death, the interior of the mouth is rendered raw. Fortunate is the man who can be certain the evil there begins and extends no farther; but who can calculate the effect upon delicate, internal organs? The mouth may be healed, but who can ascertain the state of the deeper injury? Animals are treated as though their sensibilities were not affected by any medium pain; something must be visible before the groom sanctions the right in his charge to be restless. All signs and motions denoting a gnawing agony, but not expressive of overpowering anguish, are visited with chastisement.