MAJOR S BRITISH REMEDY. 
369 
hard disease and a soft one, — i. e. between strangles and bone 
spavin, — might not the soft one (strangles) tend to mollify the 
hard one, and thus render spavin more easily curable ? Others, 
again, “grow” as splints, curb, ring-bone, cataract, &c., and 
may be regarded as parasites, animal, vegetable, or zoophyte, 
like the ivy, louse, or sponge, and might be transplanted 
from one place to another ; or suppose a cataract was to be 
engrafted on a ring-bone, it might possibly produce a 
spectacle that a purblind horse might see through. I merely 
throw out these suggestions for future enquiry and experiment 
among learned naturalists; perhaps they are not more im- 
probable than “ decomposing spavins/ 5 and “ lubricating 
ligaments/ 5 by the British Remedy. 
I am, dear Sir, 
Yours truly, &c. 
Veterinary Infirmary, 
Nile Street, Cork; 20 th May , 1853. 
MAJOR’S BRITISH REMEDY. 
To the Editor of ‘ The Veterinarian? 
Dear Sir, — Observing my name among your list of 
Contributors, with my former location still attached to it, I 
have been thinking, for some months back, of writing to you 
on some subject or another, though only to have the desig- 
nation altered ; and the remarks which are in your late 
numbers on the subject above-named, have brought my 
intention to a point. 
Here, in the country from which Mr. Major is said to 
have emigrated, all the information I have of him is derived 
from the ‘Veterinarian/ and all I find of him personally, is 
that he is “ an Englishman by birth, who has practised as a 
veterinary surgeon in America/ 5 (page 166 ) ; but whether 
his title to rank as V.S. be of British or American origin, we 
are not told. British of course it must be, if it be genuine, 
since America has not yet begun to manufacture even the raw 
germs from which, by time and experience, Veterinary 
Surgeons may be produced. I fear, however, it must be 
American ; at least the air of quackery about his proceedings 
smacks much of this side of the Atlantic. 
Here quackery reigns unmeddled with, and the empiric is 
most successful who has the longest list of ailments for which 
he says his nostrum is a cure, and blazons his falsehoods 
xxvi. 49 
