TRAINING AND FARMING COMPARED. 103 
many, or treats injudiciously this or the other one of his live 
stock, is not to be unreservedly censured; because to a 
certain extent such cases are unavoidable. But he who from 
inability or unpardonable neglect, such as want of cleanliness 
or mismanagement, suffers his fields to become sterile and 
his herds to be decimated by preventible disease, cannot offer 
as an excuse that a field here or there is flourishing, or that 
this or the other animal is in blooming health. 
And if in farming, concerning which hundreds of works 
have been written by scientific men, and for the instruc- 
tion of whose followers colleges have been built, so many 
acknowledged difficulties present themselves; what must 
be the difficulties that beset the trainer! In our profes- 
sion we have no learned treatises; no lectures on condi- 
tion; no teachers of the subtle art. It is a sealed subject, 
never discussed; one on which nothing beyond a mere 
passing word has been written. 
Under such circumstances, to lay down clear rules is a task 
neither easy nor safe; and infallibility cannot be looked for. 
Amongst trainers, then, the one who makes the fewest 
mistakes is most to be commended. No judge or general, no 
layman or divine, is perfect in knowledge. Knowledge is in 
fact progressive and progressing. The man who at a given 
time knows more than at the same time in the previous year, 
is in a fair way of attaining the knowledge he not only covets 
but deserves, be his merit or his station ever so humble or 
so exalted. “Reason,” we read, “is progressive ; instinct is 
complete. Swift instinct leaps; slow reason feebly climbs.” 
