EDITORIAL OBSERVATIONS. 
59 
THE VETERINARIAN, JANUARY 2, 1854. 
Hail, one thousand eight hundred and fifty-four ! Rut a 
little while ago we were writing 1 853 ; and now we are called 
on for 1854. Another year is added to our own age, to the 
age of our Journal, to age of every description. The wheel 
of time has completed another annual revolution : and nothing 
so much as a retrospect through the vista of past years 
makes us conscious of the number of similar revolutions that 
have been made even in our own time ; while the apparent 
rapidity of such revolutions, then, for the first time, becomes 
sensible to us. Of the various vocations in society, none 
feel the value of time more than professional persons. The 
divine is enjoined “ to work while it is day : the night 
cometh when no man can work.” The time of the lawyer 
and doctor is their stock in trade. While the man busy in 
heaping up this world’s riches, feels- that time lost is to him 
neither more nor less than so much money, if not lost, at all 
events ungained. Even poor journalists, like ourselves, dare 
not squander away time, knowing but too well that one day 
lost must be compensated for by extra labour on another, 
and that there will come days on which no procrastination 
whatever can be admitted. The work recurs with periodical 
persistence : month by month, week by week, day by day, 
the task makes its regular call; and even the conclusion of 
the old year sets no finish to it, the ending of that being but 
opening the way to the commencement of the new year ; and 
so, on and on we go, even to the end of time itself. This is 
supposing that the work, whatever it be, prove a successful 
enterprise; since, otherwise, for ought we know, it may 
terminate the very next year, and even during the one in 
which it is being written. This uncertainty connected with 
periodical literature will not appear clearly until the eye be 
thrown, broadcast, over this field of science, and little as well 
as large craft, sailing in surgite vasto , barely maintaining their 
sail, or sinking with the first heavy squall, come to be taken 
into consideration, along with concerns so long and firmly 
launched, that hardly any accident seems capable of arresting 
their onward course or destroying their prosperity. 
Under the auspices and favour of the Veterinary public 
our little barque is steadily riding, making its twenty-seventh 
voyage, in waters which have proved fatal to some half-a- 
dozen similar craft. We have lived while they have swamped; 
and yet the uncertainty of our own existence is as great as 
attaches even to animal life. Obviously, our perpetuity must 
