ANNUAL REPORT OF THE VETERINARIAN. 

 By frank H. miller, V.S. 



I RESPECTFULLY beg to submit this, my second annual 

 veterinary report, relative to the animals of your Society 

 under my immediate care at the New York Zoological Park; 

 their health, diseases, injuries, treatment, feeding, and general 

 hygienic conditions. 



Owing to the greatly increased number now in the Park, and 

 the orderly system of clinical and post-mortem reports of all 

 cases, installed early in the past year by the Pathologist, Dr. 

 Harlow Brooks, and myself, not only has our medical work 

 among the animals been greatly facilitated, but much greater 

 advantages have been attained than heretofore in point of ac- 

 curacy of treatment and tabulating conditions of disease, both 

 matters of the first importance if this work is to be continued. 



After the brief space of two years in your service in this par- 

 ticular field of science, I am fully convinced that, owing to the 

 modification of symptoms and results of diseases well known and 

 thoroughly classified in the domestic animals when communi- 

 cated to such animals as are kept in zoological installations col- 

 lected from all parts of the globe, the only manner in which a 

 scientific and really valuable knowledge of them will be attained 

 must come from this system of observing, comparing, and reduc- 

 ing to permanent records our deductions, thereby gradually but 

 surely arriving, more or less unconsciously perhaps, at a special 

 system of pathology and therapeutics, peculiarly adapted to the 

 animals of the wild state. 



Notwithstanding the fact that the current year has been se- 

 verely marked by the presence among the animals of not less than 

 seven well-known contagious diseases, I am happy to report'that 

 our past experience and investigations into the internal Park 

 conditions, and the manner of keeping certain species of animals, 

 has resulted in great good and diminished loss, and as time allows 

 further improvements to be made, to meet the demands plainly 

 suggested by the success already achieved, it is not too much to 



