74 
THE ROYAL VETERINARY COLLEGE. 
within the walls were displaced. Should the difficulty of stand- 
ing be overcome, as the persons addressed and he who delivered 
the address must stand on the same level, by what means the 
majority were to see I do not understand, and the use of demon- 
strating an anatomical subject which was not to be seen I am 
unable to comprehend. The apartment is so inappropriate, that 
its objectionableness should have been seen by the heads of the Col- 
lege, and it ought never to have been permitted the demonstrator 
to point it out. The commonest appurtenances necessary for the 
object of teaching are deficient. I certainly did see the skeleton 
of a horse in one of the smaller rooms, and I was told that upon 
this it was expected the bones should be demonstrated to the class. 
The gentleman who undertook the task must either have possessed 
extraordinary genius, or the impossibility of seeing may have here 
rendered an imperfect, as fit for the instruction of the students as a 
better specimen of osteology ; for the hocks were anchylosed, se- 
veral of the bones were broken, and some were absent : the frame- 
work was curiously distorted, and the head was actually wanting. 
Before leaving the place, I looked to observe what provision 
was made for the dissection of the horse. I saw none. No con- 
venience of any sort for raising the carcass of an animal of this 
kind on to the tables : indeed, the arrangements were of the rudest 
and coarsest description, -and poorly contrasted with those which I 
had seen in the anatomical departments of human schools. 
I passed on from the dissecting-rooms to an open piece of 
ground only divided from a road faced by a row of inhabited 
cottages through the intervention of a thin and rotten hedge, which 
may serve as a landmark, but can afford neither protection nor 
privacy. On this exposed and public spot, however, I learned the 
donkeys were destroyed, horses slaughtered, and all operations 
performed. There is a species of shed, a heavy square roof 
supported by huge posts, under which the Professors operate. 
Little boys and female children of the most tender ages, I am 
told, clamber upon the bank to peer through the hedge, or mount 
upon adjacent prominences, to witness the dying struggles or 
constrained agonies of animals here daily subjected to the knife, 
the firing-iron, and the poleaxe. To the eye of youth, the sight 
which the publicity of the place here invites to look upon, must 
be of a demoralizing and a barbarising tendency; and to the 
spectator of riper years every operation, however necessary or 
however skilfully performed, must, when viewed in ignorance of 
its necessity or its design, be degrading in its influence. The 
exposure is wholly indefensible. There is not a knacker in the 
metropolis but better provides against shocking and corrupting the 
inhabitants and children who live around his place of business; 
