PURCHASE OF HORSES IN AUSTRALIA. 
313 
elusions may be arrived at respecting the action of the drug. 
As far as I have tried the tincture, the effects have been 
beneficial, but you shall know more of the results when the 
agent has been further tested. 
ON THE PURCHASE OF HORSES IN AUSTRALIA 
FOR THE INDIAN SERVICE. 
By R. Girton, A.B., M.R.C.V.S., Melbourne; 
Dear Sirs, — Some short time since there appeared, in the 
Government Gazette of Victoria, an announcement to the 
effect that “an officer might shortly be expected for the 
purpose of purchasing horses for the cavalry service in India, 
and that dealers and others were invited to offer suitable ones 
for that object, & c.” I believe you will equally share my 
surprise when I tell you that in a selection so important the 
aid of the veterinary profession appears to have been con- 
sidered unnecessary ; an occurrence, I think, unusual in 
similar cases, as Colonel Robbins, the officer who has arrived, 
and with whom I had an interview, stated that he had full 
powers vested in him to conduct both the professional and 
non-professional part of the business, but acknowledged that 
the late Captain Abernethy, who some years since was sent 
on a similar service, was accompanied by a veterinary 
surgeon. I had naturally expected that one of the Indian 
Company’s veterinary surgeons would have arrived with him, 
but this not being the case, that it would have been con- 
sidered sufficiently important to have engaged some “ Vet.” 
Now I doubt not but that Colonel Robbins’s judgment is most 
correct, and his opinion as regards the shape of horses superior 
to that of many veterinary surgeons, but I contend that if 
the presence of obscure and difficult diseases, which only 
minute anatomical knowledge can arrive at, be hardly within 
the pale of professional experience, it must be considerably 
beyond that of an unprofessional judge. Now I do think 
that as the services of the veterinary surgeon have been found 
so beneficial of late, and so largely acknowledged, that there 
has been a most unaccountable slight offered in this instance. 
True, it may be possible that the horses, on their arrival in 
India, may be subjected to professional opinions, and the unfit 
ones draughted, but this seems to me to be an irregular and 
expensive mode of doing business. Are such large numbers 
