38 PROGRESS OF VETERINARY SCIENCE AND ART. 
occur without compression, but, as proof to the contrary, he 
cites another very interesting case. 
In the autumn of 1853, being at the fair of St. Jacques, he ob- 
served an aged horse with a singular deformity of the spine. 
At the anterior part of the lumbar region there was a sudden 
curve downwards, the back part of the column coming at an 
obtuse, or nearly right, angle with the dorsal portion; the 
abdomen was thus brought so low, that as the animal moved 
along, it nearly touched the ground. Yives questioned the 
owner, and found that some years back, the horse being out 
in the fields during a great storm, a tree, which the wind had 
uprooted, fell on the horse’s back, and fixed the poor animal 
to the ground, till some considerable time afterwards, when 
he was extricated, in a very serious condition, and unable to 
rise. His owner, out of affection and gratitude for his long 
services, would not have him killed. The horse lived, and 
regained his strength, so that he could be ridden weekly to 
market and back. Yives says, he should never have believed 
the animal could have borne the weight of a man on his 
back, had he not been an eye-witness to it. Yives adds, in 
a somewhat caustic manner, (£ let us ask those men who view 
things alone through the eyes of theory, if it is still permitted 
to doubt the possibility of dislocation of the vertebrae without 
consecutive paralysis?” He, moreover, says, that he will 
endeavour by all means to trace the above animals to their 
last home, that he may record the morbid lesions, as observ- 
able after death. — Journ . des Vet. du Midi , June, 1855. 
Unfortunately for us, veterinary surgeons have gone on, 
for too long a time already, blinded with the idea that they 
were exclusively practical men, disregarding, entirely, close 
study and close observation, in fact all true science, including 
it all under the misunderstood and abused word “ theory.” 
Other members of our profession, on the other hand, attempt- 
ing to fill every chasm in literature or instruction, by what 
they wished merely to suppose or infer , perhaps, from false 
analogy, have been treated with contempt by the self-styled 
practical men. We need not be astonished, then, if M. Yives 
is rather pungent towards those gentlemen who infer that 
the vertebrae may not be dislocated without inducing com- 
pression of the cord. 
In the last month’s number of this Journal, I introduced 
the particulars of a case of dislocated vertebrae, observed by 
M. Husson, in Brussels. Here we had great displacement 
of the third cervical vertebra, hence above the origin of the 
phrenic nerves, and the result was instantaneous death by 
asphyxia. 
