SAUSAGE, a well-known preparation of the flesh of various animals for culinary pur poses. It is made by chopping -the raw meat adding salt and other flavoring materials, and often bread-crumbs also, the whole forming a pasty mass. This is pressed into portions of the intestines of the animal, previously thoroughly cleaned and properly prepared. Usually, a considerable length of the intestine is filled and divided intd separate sausages, by constricting- it with pieces of string, at short intervals. The sausages of Lucania were very celebrated among the Romans. They were made of fresh pork, and bacon chopped fine, with nuts of the stone-pine, and flavored with cumin-seed, pepper, bay-leaves, various pot-herbs, and the sauce called garum Italy is still celebrated for its Bologna sausages, and with many people the smoked sausages of Germany are highly prized; but except when quite fresh, sausages cannot be recom• mended as wholesome food.
It is well known that sausages made or kept under certain unknown conditions are occasionally highly poisonous; and in Germany, where sausages form a staple article of diet, fatal cases of sausage poisoning are by no means rare. The
symptoms are slow in appearing, three or four days sometimes elapsing before they manifest themselves. The poison may be described as of the narcotico-irritant charac is very dangerous. Dr. Taylor, in his Medical Jurisprudence, records the cases of three persons who died from the effects of liver-sausages which had been made from an apparently healthy pig, slaughtered only the week before. The inspection threw no light on the cause of death. This case differs from those commonly occurring in Ger• many in this respect, that bere the sausages were fresh, while the sausages which have proved poisonous in Germany had always been made a long time. Dr. Kerner, a Gee. man physician, who has specially studied this subject, believes that the poison is an acid formed in consequence of a modified process of putrefaction; others regard it as an empyreuniatic oil.