769 
OBITUARY. 
M. Hurtrel d’Arboval. 
LoUIS-Henri-Joseph Hurtrel d’Arboval was born at Montreuil- 
sur-Mer, on the 7th of June, 1777. Several members of his family 
had been distinguished among the magistracy of that town from an 
early period of the seventeenth century. 
At three years of age he lost his father ; but, under the care of 
his mother, he, in due time, commenced his education at Boulogne. 
During the reign of the Terrorists, 1793, he was arrested, with his 
mother and grandfather, and confined in the prison of Abbeville ; 
and being restored to liberty on the eighteenth Brumaire, he sought 
an obscure retreat in the country, until the name of “ suspected ,” 
which this imprisonment had entailed upon him, was forgotten. It 
was not until 1798 that he came to Paris, in order to complete his 
education, and he then entered himself at the school of Alfort. 
The decided love which he had always evinced for the study 
and management of the horse, determined him, while at Alfort, to 
devote all his disposable time to the exercise of the riding-school, 
and he placed himself under the instruction of the celebrated 
Franconi. 
In 1802 he returned to his native country, and soon married. 
Being possessed of a considerable independent property, he em- 
ployed the knowledge which he had acquired in gratuitous attend- 
ance on the horses, cattle, and sheep of his friends, and the neigh- 
bouring farmers. At the period when Hurtrel d’Arboval thus 
devoted himself to the practice of the veterinary art, there were few 
well-educated or instructed veterinarians in any of the remote dis- 
tricts of the country. Veterinary schools had existed for nearly 
forty years, and yet the greater part of those to whom the profes- 
sion was abandoned were ignorant empirics, who obstinately ad- 
hered to the practice of their forefathers, notwithstanding the absur- 
dity and ruinous consequences *of that practice. It was Hurtrel 
d’Arboval who, first in his own immediate neighbourhood, and gra- 
dually through a greater extent of country, elevated the veterinary 
profession from the abject state into which it had been plunged, and 
established the evident and true distinction between the educated 
practitioner and the ignorant pretenders by whom he might be 
surrounded. The success which attended his practice, and the prac- 
tice of those who had duly studied the principles of the profession, 
compared with that of the charlatan, produced the desired impres- 
sion on the horseman and the agriculturist. 
His reputation, and the reputation of those who trod in his foot- 
steps, being, to a very considerable extent, established, and his 
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