700 
ANNIVERSARY DINNER OF THE 
tages which you have. Prepare yourselves as well as you can for this identifi- 
cation with the agriculture of the country; and the time is not distant 
when a more extended system of education will he granted to the veterinary 
student. I will not say that it will be forced from the powers that be. It 
should be freely and honourably given. 
Once more, gentlemen, when you go into the world and mingle with its 
society, the associate that you will choose will be the human surgeon. I do 
not say that you will ever stand on a level with him — post medicinam ars 
vetenmria I frankly acknowledge — our patients are different, and our remu- 
neration is different : but I will say that, post medicinam comes the art which 
you profess, and in many, many important points of view, you will not only 
proceed with your medical friend, cum passilms cequis, but there will be 
points in which he will yield, and after a while cheerfully yield, to you. 
Many of the most important points of physiology have been determined, or 
supposed to have been determined, by living dissections. To accomplish the 
purpose of one modern author the lives of 600 quadrupeds were sacrificed. 
While we read we loathe. Living dissections might have been, I will grant 
that they were, necessary in some cases ; but in others are they to be de- 
pended upon when we know the ease with which not only by extremity of 
torture, but by any powerful stimulant, even by the power of imagination, 
the most important functions of the frame may be altered, suspended, or 
inverted? Yours will be a life of pathological and physiological investiga- 
tion. Animals of almost every class will occasionally be brought before 
you. You will, with a view to that polar star of physiological investigation, 
the beautiful, the unerring adaptation of the various parts of every being to 
the state in which he is placed, and the objects which he is to accomplish — 
you will witness the healthy discharge of every function, and you will trace 
the deviation from that healthy discharge of function, and its nature, and its 
extent, and its cause. It is not a few admissible or barbarous experiments 
that will teach you this — you must live among the various classes of beings 
in order to know them as they are. I once, in a meeting of our profession, 
got myself into a sad scrape : I said, that notwithstanding the many valuable 
treatises extant on physiology, it must, at last, be a veterinary surgeon who 
would work out and complete all. I was told that I had made an impudent 
speech — that I had given great offence. Perhaps I was not sorry to be told 
so, for 1 could see whose withers were not unwrung. I repeat it again, ad- 
visedly and with conviction, he alone who has the opportunities which a 
veterinary surgeon possesses, can fairly and perfectly work out an unex- 
ceptionable treatise on physiology. 
Gentlemen, such are the prospects of the veterinary surgeon if he chooses 
to avail himself of them ; and to a very considerable extent you may prepare 
for this consummation devoutly to be wished. 
I said that I would not speak to-night of good or bad conduct, yet I must 
for one moment, for diligence and high estimation of your profession are 
essential to the accomplishment of all this. 
If you are often found 
Where sit involv’d and lost in curling clouds of Indian fume, 
And guzzling deep — the farrier, lackey, and the groom, 
you will never accomplish this object, and you will be traitors to the cause 
which you profess to espouse. 
Mr. Chairman, I beg leave to propose the health of “ The Veterinary Stu- 
dents,” and may they fulfil the expectations of, and thus best reward, their 
natural parents, and those to whom the conducting of them in the paths of 
science has been entrusted. 
