322 THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE VETERINARY SCHOOLS. 



Government. An apothecary, Ratzeburg, lectured upon materia 

 medica, etc. The course extended over three years, the education 

 having an essentially practical tendency, and, as Feser says, the sci- 

 entific ideas of Cothenius seem to have fallen on barren ground here 

 at Berlin as well as elsewhere in Germany. Few changes took 

 place previous to 1817, when complaints began to make themselves 

 unpleasantly common with reference to the total insufficiency of 

 the school to the needs of the country, the graduates being nothing 

 more nor less than somewhat better schooled empirics than the raw 

 material which had preceded them. William von Humboldt, Min- 

 ister of State to Frederick "William II, and brother to the great 

 naturalist, seems to have been well aware of these deficiencies, and 

 to have proposed a plan which, if it had been carried out, would 

 have placed this institution at an early day much further ahead than 

 it even now is as a useful adjunct of the state : he proposed to unite 

 it to the university ; but, alas ! the " horsey element " prevailed, and 

 his advice was passed heedlessly by through the opposition of the 

 Head-Master of the Royal Horse, Yon Jagow. Other untoward in- 

 fluences were also exerted by the great naturalist Rudolphi, who 

 afterward became director ; it is said that he desired to use the 

 school as a means of enriching the collections in the museum of the 

 university ; on the other hand, Thaer, the father of modern agricul- 

 ture in Germany, used an influence in that direction, so that these, 

 and probably other things, combined to nullify the sound ideas of a 

 statesman like Von Humboldt. 



Nevertheless, the discussion was not without benefit, for a re- 

 vision followed and many improvements were introduced, among 

 them the attachment to the school of one of the most important per- 

 sonages in connection with its histoiy — Dr. Gurlt, afterward direct- 

 or. Gurlt was a scientist par excellence — a man wholly bound 

 up in study, investigations, and in making collections for the mu- 

 seum. The school gained great fame from his presence, but the 

 benefits he conferred upon it were not so much due to his powers 

 as a teacher as they were to his literary productions and the mag- 

 nificence and great number of his scientific collections. I believe 

 I do not exaggerate in saying that Gurlt was in reality the founder 

 of all our veterinary anatomy of the present day ; he certainly intro- 

 duced the true nomenclature of comparative anatomy, and more 

 than any other man established the relation of given muscles in the 

 domestic animals to those of man. He was also the chief worker in 

 the field of the periodic development of the foetus in animals, as 

 well as that of the monstrosities, and his collection of animal para- 



