673 
ON THE DISEASES OF CATTLE, &C. 
The dog, upon whose usefulness and fidelity many a volume 
has been written, and still much remains to be told ; he, who 
of all animated nature it has been said is the only true friend to 
man, “ The last to desert, the first to defend” — he occupies a 
far different place in the orders and tribes or families of animals 
from either of those I have just mentioned, but belongs to the 
same division and class, — the order carnivora, and the section of 
the order digiti grade ; meaning that he walks upon the points 
of the toes, and not upon the soles of the feet;— the genus canis, 
and the sub-genus canis domesticus. 
The pig, the last animal to which I shall have to direct your 
attention, is placed in the order pachydermata and the genus sus. 
Having disposed of . this part of my subject, I shall proceed to 
narrate to you the history of cattle medicine in this country ; and 
here I fear that we shall find little to instruct, however much we 
may be amused by the opinions held by our predecessors in the 
practice of this art. 
It does not appear that Blundeville — one of our oldest veteri- 
nary authors, who lived in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and 
wrote a work entitled “The Four Chiefest Offices belonging 
to Horsemanship” — entertained any wish to encourage a cultiva- 
tion of a knowledge of the diseases of cattle and sheep, as his 
book is entirely confined to a consideration of those of horses. The 
same remark will apply to the labours of another author, who 
flourished at about this period, but whose work seems not to be 
so well known as that of Blundeville. It is from the pen of 
Nicholas Morgan, and has a large proportion of its pages taken 
up in giving directions for the cure of the maladies of horses. It 
bears the date of 1609, and is called “ The Perfection of Horse- 
manship.” 
The first book in which (so far as my researches have gone) 
I find any allusion to the diseases of cattle, is the Art of Hus- 
bandry, bearing date 1631, by Captain Gervase Markham. I trust 
you will excuse the introduction of what may appear a little 
foreign to our present subject, if I dwell for a moment upon the 
productions of this well known writer; and I am the more desir- 
ous of doing this, because it has been said, by almost all our writers 
on the history of veterinary medicine in this country, that Ger- 
vase Markham was a very voluminous and verbose writer, who 
flourished at the latter part of the seventeenth century, and whose 
works are merely a copy of those, such as Blundeville, &c., who 
had gone before him. This, upon examination, I believe we shall 
find not to be strictly correct. 
I was induced to look into this matter, from observing that, in 
the title-page of the work which I have mentioned, the author 
