AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON. 
O 
after all that may be said on the score of humanity (and I trust 
that neither our employers nor ourselves are deficient in any such 
feeling), the price of horses it is that will do the most for veteri¬ 
nary science. 
Having said thus much, gentlemen, on the chief object of 
veterinary science, the Horse, I shall now enter on some ob¬ 
servations touching the science itself. The veterinary art is 
but of comparatively modern introduction into this country— 
one that, fifty years ago, was in the hands of a set of men 
who, from their want of education and the mechanical na¬ 
ture of their occupation, were unfitted for any thing that required 
science or art, save the handicraft which they practised at the 
anvil, of making horseshoes and nailing them upon the feet. 
Like the barber-surgeons of old, from the circumstance of their 
operative services being required, and so frequently in one way, on 
the body, they were called (there being either a total want or great 
paucity of medical practitioners) to exercise an art of which they 
possessed no other knowledge than such traditionary lore as 
might have been handed down to them by their forefathers. In 
such hands as these, it was not to be expected that our art could 
thrive—that it ever could sufficiently develope its utility and im¬ 
portance, to assert those claims on society in general, to which, 
I trust, every year we advance in the present age is adding some 
fresh ones. 
Such was the barbarous or, at least, uncultivated state of the 
veterinary art at the time that St. Bel, a French gentleman from 
the veterinary school at Lyons, arrived in this country. He it 
was that prompted the first effort to redeem our art from the 
abyss of ignorance and superstition into which it had long and 
lowly fallen, and once more to set it on those pedestals of 
science upon which it had already rested, during the ages of 
the Greeks and Romans. Such a strong hold, however, had 
these descendants of Vulcan got of the art (or, rather, so 
unknown and undervalued were the advantages it held out to 
produce in skilful or qualified hands), that when St. Bel arrived 
in this country, in 1788, and made public proposals to teach an 
improved practice of it on the principles of science, his offers met 
with no encouragement, and he was compelled to retrace his steps 
to France. Undaunted, however,by this one unsuccessful attempt, 
he made another visit to England, two years afterwards; and 
this turned out a fortunate one. For, on this occasion, an agri¬ 
cultural society, the Odiham, a proof of their good sense and 
very much to their credit, gave ear to what Monsieur St. Bel had 
to propose ; and finally resolved themselves into a body, called the 
Veterinary College of London, with a view to the erection of a 
