Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 05.djvu/388

CONSTIPATION. and water clysters, given every two hours; smart friction and cloths wrung out of hot water applied to the abdomen, with three drachms of aloes and one of calomel, given in gruel, and repeated in sixteen hours if no effect is produced. Give, besides, walking exercise; restrict the amount of dry solid food, but allow plenty of thin gruel or other fluids, which may be rendered more laxative by admixture with treacle or a little salt. Similar treatment is called for in dogs, cats, and pigs. In cattle and sheep digestion principally takes place in the large and quadrisected stomach; the bowels, accordingly, are little liable to derangement; and constipation, when occurring in these animals, generally depends upon impaction of dry hard food between the leaves of the manyplies, third stomach, or fardel-bag. The complaint is hence called fardel-bound. It results from the eating of tough and indigestible food, such as ripe vetches, rye-grass, or clover; it prevails in dry seasons, and on pastures where the herbage is coarse and the water scarce. It occurs among cattle partaking freely of hedge-cuttings or shoots of trees, hence its synonym of wood-evil. From continuous cramming and want of exercise, it is frequent in stall-feeding animals, while from the drying up of the natural secretions it accompanies most febrile and inflammatory diseases. The milder cases constitute the ordinary form of indigestion in ruminants, are accompanied by what the cowman terms loss of cud, and usually yield to a dose of salts given with an ounce or two of ginger. In more protracted cases rumination is suspended, appetite is gone, constipation and fever are present. There is a grunt noticeable, especially when the animal is moved, and different from that accompanying chest-complaints, by its occurrence at the commencement of expiration. By pressing the closed fist upward and forward beneath the short ribs on the right side, the round, hard, distended stomach may be felt. This state of matters may continue for ten days or a fortnight, when the animal, if unrelieved, becomes nauseated, and sinks. Stupor sometimes precedes death, while in some seasons and localities most of the bad cases are accompanied by excitement and frenzy. In this, as in other respects, the disease closely corresponds with stomach-staggers in the horse. Treatment.—Give purgatives in large doses, combining several together, and exhibiting them with stimulants in plenty of fluid. For a medium-sized ox or cow, use three-quarters of a pound each of common and Epsom salts, ten croton beans, and a drachm of calomel, with three ounces of turpentine, and administer this in half a gallon of water. If no effect is produced in twenty hours, repeat the dose. Withhold all solid food; encourage the animal to drink gruel, soft bran mashes, molasses and water; and give exercise, enemata, and occasional hot fomentations to the belly.  CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY. See .  CONSTITUTION (Lat. constitutio, a settlement of a controversy; then a decree; from conttituere, to cause to stand, to establish, from con- + statuere, to erect, to establish). Formerly used of any law promulgated by sovereign authority. In the Roman Empire, the imperial legislation, decreed and put into effect by the will of the Emperor, was comprehensively described by the term constitutiones. These included rescripts, or answers to questions or petitions; mandates, or instructions to officials, administrative and judicial; decrees, or judgments on causes brought before him, directly or on appeal; and edicts, or general proclamations. See .

So in early English law, constitution signified any statute, though it was not commonly employed except with reference to certain important legislation affecting the relations of the State and the Church. Thus, the Constitutions of Clarendon were laws enacted in the reign of Henry II. at a Parliament held at Clarendon in 1164, restricting the power of the clergy, limiting the right of appeal to the Pope, and virtually making the King the supreme head of the Church in England.

At the present time, however, the term is used in the more restricted sense of the fundamental law of a State, society, or corporation, public or private. More specifically, the Constitution of a State or society is the body of legal rules by virtue of which it is organized and governed, and which determines its legal relations to other States and societies and to its own members. This Constitution may be created by the political or other body whose powers it defines and regulates, or by the individuals composing it and from whom its powers are derived, or it may be the creation of an external authority to which it is subject. Examples of the last form of constitution are afforded by the case of the ordinary private corporation, whose fundamental law is prescribed by the State to which it owes its existence; by municipal corporations, such as cities and villages, which derive their authority from their charters of incorporation and from the municipal law of the State to which they belong; and by subject States, territories, or colonies, whose constitutions are to be looked for in the legislation of the parent or sovereign State. The constitutions of Canada, of Hawaii, of Porto Rico, and to a certain extent that of the Republic of Cuba, belong to this class—the act of the American Congress, under the authority and the limitations of which the Cuban Constitution was recently enacted, being in effect a part thereof.

Examples of the second form of fundamental law exist, in the political sphere, in popular constitutions like those of the United States, of the several States of the American Union, of the French Republic, and of Switzerland; and, in the domain of private law, by the rules adopted by the stockholders of corporations and voluntary associations for the conduct of their affairs by their boards of directors and other officers.

The first type of constitution, in which the fundamental law is the creation of the powers wielding the sovereign authority of the State, is to be found in all of the monarchical States of Europe which have adopted, in whole or in part, a constitutional form of government. The free Constitution of England, so popular in character and so largely the product of custom, in a strict legal sense, belongs in this category as clearly as does the government of the Czar, the autocratic character of which has been modified by imperial concessions. To this class also we must refer the Constitution of the Roman Empire, as well as of the Republic, and of the free commonwealths of ancient Greece. It is to this form of constitution, because it is alterable bv the ordinary legislative authority of the State, that Mr. Bryce 