VETERINARY SCIENCE DEFENDED. 
503 
lengths to which charlatanism proceeds, the easier will be the task 
which reason, and the permanent interests of our profession, will 
have to perform. 
Charlatanism under every possible form has been, and not 
merely once, “ weighed in the balance and found wanting,” but 
has again and again struggled to survive; yet, as civilization and 
knowledge have advanced, so in proportion has it lost its footing 
in the world ; and whoever may review the life of the empiric, 
will find him the offspring of ignorance. Perverseness, stupidity, 
and presumption, have grown with his growth. 
It may be asked, what 1 define an empiric to be. I would 
say, the man who ventures by rote, by habit, without scientific 
principle, and coming from the stable or the anvil, as the groom 
or blacksmith, to practise the veterinary art. Ninety out of every 
hundred of these persons are men of no education. Fifty out of 
every hundred cannot read or write. They are men who never 
had an opportunity to gain information — men who have no sci- 
entific character to lose. All sorts of persons are, now a-days, 
allowed, without the least discrimination or slightest restriction, 
to practise the art of veterinary surgery — men totally incapable 
of inductive reasoning, or who know, in scarcely a single instance, 
why they do what they do. Are such men as these, I would 
ask, to be trusted with that which forms so vast a portion of our 
common wealth ? Are their respectability, education, and pro- 
fessional abilities, to be reposed in with implicit confidence? Is 
an art which abounds with intricacies and complications, in the 
forms of the most abstruse diseases — of the greatest possible dif- 
ficulty to rightly understand or properly to treat, to be trusted 
to the non-educated, inconsiderate, and discreditable practice of 
the meanest and lowest grades of society ? No ; nothing short 
of abuse of language can, by any possible means, give the 
slightest show or the faintest taint of truth to this false and 
obtruded practice. Is not the simplicity of the credulous im- 
posed upon? Do not the interests of society at large call 
loudly for a prohibitory measure ? Is it not one that is abso- 
lutely necessary? 
But why object to a college education? Is the student of ne- 
cessity to abandon those notions he has long cherished, and held 
near and dear to his heart? No : he goes to college in order to 
gain that information which will enable him to choose at all times, 
and under all circumstances, the most suitable and most appro- 
priate remedy. It is a place set apart solely for that purpose. 
It is the storehouse of veterinary knowledge. It is the central 
spring from which emanates the most genuine veterinary infor- 
mation. It is the grand labyrinth where mysteries are investi- 
