ABUSES AT THE ENGLISH VETERINARY COLLEGE. 37 
College and the Veterinary Medical Association, but he is the le- 
gally appointed lecturer on chemistry and materia medica. Why, 
I would ask, do not the Governors make the salary sufficient for 
him, as a lecturer, without his being obliged to fill a situation so 
much inferior 1 It is degrading, both to the lecturer and the Col- 
lege, to have such an amalgamation. 
Often have I been surprised that he should be enabled to lec- 
ture at all, considering the multiplicity of his engagements ; but 
he is a man of tact and persevering industry, and he is well known 
to be so to all the College. As secretary to the Association, he 
must never be lost. His heart is in that cause. It is his own. 
I will now turn to the Assistant Professor, Mr. Spooner, and I 
would ask, who can say a word against him 1 lam sure if the 
College does not prosper, and is not what it ought to be, it is not 
his fault, for I really believe he wishes it to be perfect ; and to him 
Hook for its purification, and the placing of it on an equality with 
the first continental schools. 
If his lectures, at times, have not been delivered regularly, I ask 
whose fault was it 1 The Professor’s : for this latter gentleman 
was not attending to his duty at the College, and the former had 
more than enough to do to attend to his own duties. In order to 
judge of his value, look at the lecture room : or recollect what was 
the appearance of the dissecting-room when he was demonstrator. 
There is now, and there was then, scarcely a student absent. 
As to the Professor, I cannot say of him as I did of the Assistant 
Professor, that no one can find fault with him ; for I believe that 
there never was a more irregular, unsystematic course of lectures 
delivered (so far as I heard them) than his during the last session. 
Instead of commencing with the symptoms, and proceeding with 
the nature, cause, progress, treatment, &c., of a disease, he jumped 
from one to another, and also to other diseases, so that we scarcely 
knew at last what he was lecturing about. It was almost an im- 
possibility to take the substance of his lectures down ; indeed, I 
should have liked to have seen them in print as delivered by him, 
for they would have been a great curiosity of their kind. 
When he had the table loaded with specimens of disease, he 
used to put me more in mind of a man going round at a wild beast 
show, explaining the different animals, than any thing else ; and, 
as to cattle pathology, he is entirely ignorant of it, and a laughing- 
stock to those who know the least of it. At the end of each 
lecture on the different diseases of the horse, he used slightly to 
allude to the same disease in the cow, &c. ! and a most miserably 
meagre account he gave of them. Indeed, I call it humbugging the 
students and the Agricultural Society. 
I wonder how any man can take upon himself to fill the arduous 
