VETERINARY SCIENCE. 
177 
Sec. than in the evening. During the day the accumulated ex- 
citability becomes exhausted by food, vision, passions, mental 
and boddy exercise, &c. ; consequently a person taking great exer- 
cise, in either body or mind, meets his couch at night with more 
grateful feelings than a person of an indolent and inactive dispo- 
sition. 
THE VETERINARIAN, MARCH 1, 1842. 
Ne quid falsi dicere audeat, ue quid veri non audeat. — Cicero. 
It has often struck us to be a serious omission in the education 
of the veterinary pupil, that, let him have issued out of what 
part of society or line of life he may, no opportunity awaits him 
at College for the acquirement of knowledge of which he may 
perchance be entirely destitute; or if not quite without, in the 
possession of too little to fit him either for the due understand- 
ing of the medical lectures about to be delivered to him, or for 
the subsequent practice of that art of which he is about to be 
instructed in the theory. It is not every man who comes to 
study veterinary medicine that has had the advantages of a horse 
infirmary or a farrier’s shop, or a dealer’s or livery yard. How 
many pupils have come from situations where horses have been 
never beheld by them but through glass windows, and whose 
thoughts never alighted upon animals at all, until they found 
themselves transported through some caprice of fortune between 
the walls of a veterinary college! When there, they are expected, 
all at once, to enter upon the study of the complex structures of 
w'hich the animal body is constituted, with the exteriors of which 
they are hardly sufficiently acquainted to recognize the creatures 
when they see them ! It might have been the observing of this 
defective preparation, and consequent want of foretaste for 
the art among his pupils, which led the late Professor Coleman 
to say, that the sons of grooms and farriers made the best veteri- 
nary surgeons; and, practically speaking, they generally do, and 
for this reason, that the others never obtained any “ knowledge of 
horses,” save what little they might have gathered among twenty 
or thirty invalids. How truly absurd to suppose that a person 
who has emerged from behind a linen-draper’s counter, is, by 
two or three years’ study at a veterinary college, to leave school 
“ qualified to practise the veterinary art!” What man conver- 
sant himself in horses, would like to trust his horse in such 
hands ? Such a pupil wants to begin with a knowledge of do- 
mestic animals in general, in particular of the horse, the dog, the 
ox, the sheep ; a knowledge of their nature, and habits, and 
uses, in a state of domesticity; of their management and diete- 
vol. xv. a a 
