132 ANNUAL. REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



APPENDIX. 



THE VALUE TO THE NATION OF VETERINARY SCHOOLS. 



By LEONARD PEAKSON, B. S., V. M. D. 

 A paper read before the Pennsylvania State Veterinary Medical Association. March 7, 1906. 



President Elliott lias said: "It is a disgrace to organized education 

 that any nation should refuse, as our own people are so aj)t to do, 

 to learn from the experience of other nations; the schools must have 

 failed to teach history as they should have done." 



The American people have been so greatly favored by a virgin, 

 fertile soil, by great natural stores of wealth, by kindly climates 

 and by the absence of a hostile frontier that, as a nation, they have 

 not yet been driven to a severe struggle for existence and to the de- 

 velopment of habits and practices of economy, or to a careful hus- 

 banding of their resources. The typical American method is that 

 of the miner rather than that of the husbandman. The husbanding 

 of one's estate — husbandry — is in direct contrast with the exhaustion 

 of the rich stores of nature without replacement — mining. 



Our great progress as a nation is largely due to the profits derived 

 from turning into cash the bounteous products and stores of nature, 

 the furs, timber, oil, coal, iron and other minerals and, above all, 

 the surplus plant food accumulated and waiting in the soil for the 

 pioneer farmer. These riches, some of which have been gathering 

 thousands of years, and some of which were deposited ages ago, 

 are rapidly being transmuted into fluid capital and some are already 

 well-nigh exhausted. The fur bearing animals are almost gone, the 

 end of our timber resources can be seen in the near distance, the eas- 

 ily available coal and mineral deposits are rapidly diminishing and 

 the limits of the soil areas characterized by surplus fertility arc; 

 contracting at a startling rate. 



The ready minted gold dollars that nature scattered so bountifully 

 and covered so lightly throughout the length and breadth of our 

 country have nearly all been gathered. They were gathered by the 

 lumberman who chopped doAvn and marketed the noble forests of 

 Maine, of Pennsylvania and of Michigan; they were garnered by the 

 tobacco growers and the cotton planters who formerly tilled the 

 virgin fields of the South, many of which are now half exhausted and 

 some of which are barren; they were gathered by the early settlers 

 on the rich and seenjinn:ly exhaustless lands of the middle West, 

 where it was possible to grow wheat or corn on the same land year 

 after year, without intermission, for a generation, but where it is 

 now necessary to follow an appropriate rotation of crops and to have 

 a care for the restoration of the elements of fertility; they were 

 gathered by the cattlemen and sheepmen who owned the vast herds 

 and flocks that formerly ranged over the unoccupied lands of the 

 far West, great areas of which have so suffered from exhaustion 

 from over-stocking that they are now practically useless, and the 



