585 
REVIEW. 
Quid sit pulchrum, quid turpe, quid utile, quid non. — Mon. 
Horses; their Varieties, Breeding, and Management in 
Health and Disease. By H. D. Richardson, Author of 
“ Dogs,” “ Pigs,” & c., with numerous Illustrations, drawn by 
Chas. Grey, and engraved by H. Oldham. Small 8vo. pp. 97. 
2d 1000. M'Glashan, Dublin; and Orr and Co. London. 
1848. 
Among the remarkable features of the age we live in, to be 
transmitted down to those who may live after us, an overwhelm- 
ing and unceasing production of literary merchandise, good, bad, 
and indifferent, and of books in the greatest variety and cheapest 
of forms, most assuredly will not be the least conspicuous Penny 
Magazines and Penny Cyclopsedias, first put into circulation by the 
“ Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge,” led the way to 
cheap literature, and had, perhaps, a good deal to do with its pro- 
fusion as well ; and like the “ penny steamboats ” plying on our 
busy metropolitan river, no doubt in the numbers of their cus- 
tomers have had their reward. Whether literature in such cheap 
and crowded forms really begat any great amount of knowledge, 
or whether the knowledge which it did beget was of a “ useful ” 
character, are questions we pretend not here to determine, farther 
than they have relation to medicine. And certainly here, as the 
maxim so current in law equally holds good with us — that “ a little 
knowledge is a dangerous thing” — we should say that in the prac- 
tice both of human and veterinary medicine, instead of being pro- 
ductive of good, it has done harm, as well to doctors as to patients. 
Open-mouthed, good natured John Bull is too ready to swallow 
dogmas wrapped up by quacks and impostors, like the ladies’ pills, 
in gold leaf, labelled with the golden letters that medicine, as 
though it were one of the mathematical sciences, admits of being 
reduced to unerring cause and effect ; that for every malady there 
exists an appropriate remedy, for every poison a certain antidote ; 
and that it is only to become acquainted with the disease and the 
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