THE VETERINARY ART. 
591 
having lent a helping hand in the praiseworthy undertaking. 
Contrast the irrational and too often cruel practice of the farrier 
with the humane and scientific management adopted by the vete- 
rinary surgeon. Reflect upon the horrible cases resulting from 
such mistreatment — cases such as grease up to the very hocks, 
canker eating off the hoofs, quittor ending in monstrous de- 
formity, and anchylosis, fistula and poll-evil, laying the horse 
up so long that a pistol-bullet was in numberless instances re- 
sorted to rather than encounter a process of “ cure.” Let those 
old enough to remember what the veterinary management was of 
public and private establishments look into similar establishments 
at the present day, and say what improvements have therein 
taken place in consequence of the rise and spread of veterinary 
science. Improved, however, as our art is, and great as can be 
shewn to be the advantages everywhere in the animal world de- 
rivable therefrom, it would be the height of presumption and folly 
in us to suppose we have yet acquired any point approaching per- 
fection in our craft. What we have achieved has been effected 
with comparative ease. Our grand difficulties remain yet to be 
surmounted, and until they have been overcome, we must not 
boast much about our skill. When we shall behold glanders, and 
farcy, and periodic ophthalmia, and two or three other formid- 
able diseases — at present a reproach to us — vanishing at the sight 
of our prescriptions ; when we shall have so modified the black- 
smith’s labour that a shoe shall be made that will neither fetter 
nor cramp the horse’s foot ; when we shall have developed the 
causes of, and devised remedies for, lameness of whatsoever kind 
it may be, then indeed, but not till then, we may begin to talk 
about the perfection of our art. We have done something, it is 
true; but we have much — a great deal more — yet to accomplish. 
Found, as our art was, in the hands of men working without 
a single principle to direct them — men who, traditionally, had 
set up for menders and repairers of machines of whose mechan- 
ism and operation they knew nothing — to one acquainted with 
the structure and functions of an animal body, the task of reform 
on the basis of science, became at once an easy and a pleasant 
one. Human medicine had chalked out the road, and the prose- 
cutor of the veterinary had but to pursue it, with such occasional 
