201 
REFECTIONS ON CATTLE PATHOLOGY. 
cators as the veriest visionaries; and believed that “ Nature” all 
powerful as she so often proves herself to be, overpowering every 
effort that the wilfulness, ignorance, and presumption of man can 
devise for her destruction, would again bear them through. It ap- 
peared that the more ignorant, the more brutal a man was found 
to be, the better estimation he had accorded to him on all points 
connected with the diseases of our domesticated animals ; but if a 
man who, previously fitted by study, reflection, knowledge of prin- 
ciples, extensive acquaintance with the laws of life in health or 
disease, made an attempt at amelioration, or held out the voice of 
warning, derision, inattention, nay often the expression of the 
supremest contempt, was the only reward which greeted him. 
This picture is unfortunately too faithful to truth ; and this per- 
sistence in a bad course now meets with its reward. Now, the 
cry throughout the length and breadth of the land is for assistance ; 
but from whence is it to come ! — Many have endeavoured to ex- 
plain, but with the effect of rendering confusion more confounded. 
Still there is hope, still means of amelioration, means of warding off 
many of the ill consequences which otherwise must inevitably 
ensue, and, though now at a late hour, there is yet good to be 
done. 
Owners of stock have to thank themselves for a very consider- 
able portion of the losses which they encounter ; their blindness to 
their own interest, their penuriousness, the attempt at saving of a 
shilling and losing of a pound — the most extraordinary persistence 
in the opinion that the cowherd, the shepherd, the illiterate itine- 
rant quack, who invariably springs from the lowest and most igno- 
rant of the people, were the whole and sole depositories of a 
science, abstruse and as yet unexplored — that such as these could 
alone know, could alone treat all the maladies to which cattle are 
liable. How often has the gibe, the taunt, the insult, met me in 
my prosecution of the study of cattle pathology ; the sneer that a 
shepherd or cowherd must know better than I did, because he was 
always with his flock, or in the barton ; — in other words, the men 
who know how to pitch a fold, to cleanse a shed, to drive the flock 
or herd to water or to pasture — profoundly ignorant of the laws 
of life, of the structure, the mechanism of the animal frame — must 
(I suppose) from merely inhaling the effluvia emitted by the ani- 
mals they attended, imbibe more knowledge than the man who, 
studying the subject as an anatomist, physiologist, pathologist, 
and coupled with all the knowledge of routine attendance which 
they felt so proud of — could attain by these loftier means, and thus 
throw light on points which were involved in obscurity or overlaid 
by ignorance, and reduce thereby to simple rules, to simple treat- 
ment, diseases hitherto fatal, because allowed from ignorance to 
revel in the system till all hope of restoration was passed. 
