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COMPTE RENDU OF THE 
irrigations, passed last session, will become a powerful means of 
improving agriculture and ameliorating our domestic breeds. 
But there is another law which, although a less important one, 
will, without doubt, not fail to operate most favourably towards the 
conservation and improvement of the very considerable part of the 
public property which is represented by the mass of animals cover- 
ing our soil : we allude to the law intended to regulate in France 
the practice of the veterinary profession. 
And, indeed, among the pests which desolate our country, empi- 
ricism is not the one which occasions farmers the slightest loss. 
Diligent propagators of the most absurd prejudices, obstinate fol- 
lowers of the most routine and dangerous practices, cow-leeches, 
abound in every part of our country, opposing to every idea 
of improvement and onward progress the most insurmountable 
barriers. 
Notwithstanding they are by Nature endowed with so little 
intelligence, all their art is employed in deceiving others ; and, 
being in their turn duped themselves whenever they really mean 
well, their game consists in causing their clients to participate in 
their ignorance. 
Would any person credit it 1 — In many parts of France, at the 
very barrier even of Paris, any contagion which a disease may 
exhibit is reckoned a fatality falling on the stable, and that the evil 
spirit must be exorcised, the ceremony for such purpose consist- 
ing in tracing some crosses upon the wall, and in some magic words, 
void of sense and reason, pronounced by the sanative sorcerer with 
a low voice in the infected stable. 
As for any measures of precaution, simple and natural as they 
may appear, which would have the effect of circumscribing the 
evil within its primitive fomes, nobody ever dreams of such a 
thing; and so the contagious animals, free to go anywhere, carry 
with them the germ of the disorder they have concealed about 
them, and disseminate it in all quarters. 
This, in a few words, comprises the history of the rise of most 
of our contagious epidemics. Once declared, the empiric becomes 
the active propagator of the disease. Heedless of measures of 
prevention which he does not understand, he goes about from the 
infected to the healthy stable (or cow-house), that he may give the 
last the benefit of his sorceries, and thus transmits, through his 
clothes infected with the virus, the germ of the evil he affects by 
his magic to destroy. 
Neither is it only through the active part which he takes to 
“ cure” the animals that this pretender renders himself obnoxious. 
The discredit he throws on our profession, the discouragement he 
