LIVERPOOL VETERINARY MEDICAL ASSOCIATION. 307 
and can do it ; that is all he learns during his apprenticeship. I do 
not wish to say that what he has acquired is not useful and necessary; 
but, farther than a little exercise of memory, he has not gained any 
real knowledge of his profession : his intelligence, his reasoning 
powers, have been left dormant, and, probably, will ever remain so. 
Is it not a fact that our most successful men in business, men who 
require assistants to help them to get through their work, do not 
send the most successful students to college ? If this is a fact, then 
there must be something wrong; either the system is wrong or 
the pUpil is deficient in capacity, or he has not been treated 
properly when under his master’s care. The instructor has not 
succeeded in giving his pupil a thirst for knowledge ; nor has he 
helped to strengthen his reasoning powers by teaching him to trace 
effects to their causes. If I am to any extent right in these sur- 
mises, then I would suggest, as probable means of overcoming the 
difficulty, that the period of apprenticeship, and the college teaching, 
should be alternate. The pupil, being selected, should serve for six, 
nine, or twelve months in ordinary practice — doing what he can with 
his hands, keeping his eyes and ears open to pick up what may be 
called the technicalities of the profession- — then he should go to 
college. No time would be lost, for the pupil would have been 
learning something every day ; he would not yet, however, have 
learned tc think himself as good as his master, but would still be 
teachable. Arrived at college, he would enter heartily into his 
studies. He would daily hear explanations and reasons given for 
the facts that he had seen, and would be delighted to find that he 
could appreciate and understand the why and the wherefore of the 
whole matter. 
At the end of the first session he would return home in a very 
anxious, and, to him, unsatisfactory state of mind : the detailed 
symptoms, as he finds them in his note book, are no doubt correct 
enough — but it needs the practised eye satisfactorily to distinguish 
them from others somewhat alike, and which must not be confounded 
with them. He thus, painfully it may be, acquires a careful habit 
of diagnosis. He has been warned against mistakes, and he cannot 
now innocently and thoughtlessly fall into them. He may, and he 
no doubt will, make mistakes ; but if he does so, he will at least be 
able to urge some reason or excuse for his error. The fresh interest 
which will be excited by every case of disease will have scarcely 
begun to flag before his return to college, where he will be induced 
to pay more attention than ever to the subjects that have troubled 
or delighted him during his summer’s practice ; he will then be able 
to compare notes with the lecturer, and to take a most intelligent 
interest in every thing which comes under his notice. 
I have thus very briefly sketched out a plan that I have good 
reason to believe would prove most satisfactory to the student of 
veterinary medicine. 
A young man entirely educated at college, however talented, is 
placed in a very painful and really false position, when he receives 
the certificate which asserts that he is qualified to practice. The 
