VETERINARY MEDICINE OF PARIS. 
283 
viz. medicine, hygiene, physiology. These govern the first, group 
them around them, and cement them together into a combination 
perfectly consistent with nature. 
To embrace this concentration, to understand the harmony of it, 
to appreciate what the influence of every constituent part should 
be, and what its relation is with adjacent parts, we must not con- 
fine ourselves to the study of any one in particular among them. 
We must have looked into all of them, have studied them all in 
succession, and in their reciprocal connexion ; in a word, we must 
have become veterinarians. 
Such, gentlemen, was the view you took when 3 r ou came to the 
wise decision in one of the laws of your constitution, that none but 
veterinarians could become members of your society. 
I am aware it may be said, we have too much narrowed our sys- 
tem in so completely isolating ourselves, in not giving to sciences 
in connexion with our own, medicine, agriculture, pharmacy, at 
least to a certain extent, a representative among us. It might 
be said that, in so acting, we have voluntarily shut out from 
among us lights ever resulting from analogy and comparison. This 
objection is a grave one, gentlemen, and you have discussed its 
full weight on the occasion of making your laws. You have con- 
sidered that, before you called to your aid foreign colloborateurs, 
it were better, in the first instance, to have your constitution exclu- 
sively of yourselves, to depend alone upon your own resources, 
and thus to establish a society permanent and pregnant in useful 
labours. 
At the period and under the circumstances we are at present 
acting, when there is a disposition abroad to deny the veterinary 
a place among sciences — although the world is yet in ignorance of 
the reach and extent of our science — is it not of the greatest im- 
portance to us to shew the possibility of making up a society out 
of the members of our profession, and to prove that there exists 
no scientific question standing without the pale of its compe- 
tence I 
Then, when you have given proofs of what you are able to do, 
made yourselves strong in your position by antecedent labours, 
and having your individuality well established, you will be at 
liberty to assimilate foreign bodies without the apprehension of 
having thereby your own homogenity interrupted. 
Moreover, the validity of the objection just urged against exclu- 
siveness is weakened when we come to consider that, in a society 
wholly veterinary, the elements of comparative studies are not 
likely to be wanting. 
In fact, notwithstanding every subject embraced by our science 
may be found united where competence exists, yet, will the indi- 
