124 History of Animal Plagues. 



remedial measures really of great moment. Before the Christian 

 era, and up to the fourth century, there were veterinarians, and 

 even veterinary schools, and physicians acquired much of their 

 learning from the study of animal medicine. But on the death of 

 Augustus and the fall of the Roman Empire, the progress of learn- 

 ing and the arts sustained a sad reverse. The horrors and the 

 desolation attendant upon the invasion of this ancient but ad- 

 vanced civilization by the Goths and V^andals in the sixth cen- 

 tury, buried all in gloom. This great revolution, which marked 

 the termination of an antiquated civilization in as great obscurity 

 as it had begun, was quickly succeeded by a startling event — the 

 commencement of modern history in the midst of this confusion, 

 and the appearance of a new dominant race, the Arab, ruling 

 over many of the semi-civilized and barbarous tribes dwelling in 

 Europe, Asia, and Africa. A new religion stimulated this people 

 to conquest, and Mahomet propagated his creed sword in 

 hand. Under his successors, the remaining Alexandrian library 

 — containing, it is said, 700,000 volumes — was burnt, and the 

 treatises on medicine which escaped destruction were but few. 

 Medical science made scarcely any progress in the changes and 

 contentions which ensued for supremacy. 



The Goths were a nation of warriors, who forbade their 

 children the knowledge of reading and writing, or any other kind 

 of learning, save that pertaining to the use of warlike weapons ; 

 believing, as they did, that education and the arts and sciences 

 had enervated and made effeminate the strength and bravery of 

 the Romans. True it is, that in the days of the Byzantine em- 

 pire veterinary medicine was in a somewhat flourishing condition, 

 having such representatives as Apsyrtus, Hippocrates, Theom- 

 nestus, and others, and in general was in advance of human medi- 

 cine, until the fall of that empire. But neither were in very 

 promising state, and in Europe the Arabs were but slow in 

 making their learning known, though in 980 Avicenna had 

 written his celebrated svstem of medicine. When the Byzantine 

 empire was finally demolished, learning may be said to have 

 slumbered. But by degrees, though slowly, it began to awake, 

 and the arts tardily commenced to revive; yet, under the Saracens, 

 that most essential branch of medical study, anatomy, was 



