292 EXCLUSION OF VETERINARY SURGEONS 
examiners, and they the pupils, we should not want' an excuse 
for turning them back for a few months. 
The teacher of anatomy or medicine in the metropolis (for to 
him, it seems, the office of examiner is to be confined) {^peculiarly 
unfit to decide on the merits of the veterinaiy pupil. Brought at 
an early period from the country, and, for many a laborious year, 
his time divided between the dissecting room, his study, and his 
practice, and, after that, his pupils and his patients occupying him, 
and often painfully occupying him wholly, he is, least of all 
persons, a horseman. He is perfectly ignorant of the points, the 
qualities, the habits, the treatment of the horse; and with all his 
medical attainments, if he presume to interfere with the management 
of his stable, he is the laughing-stock of the most illiterate groom. 
Mr. Coleman tells us in his introductory lecture (wrongly we 
think), that the human surgeon, even after he has honestly and 
diligently studied in the school of animal medicine, makes a bad 
practitioner, and rarely succeeds; and, yet, they whose want of 
time and whose habits forbid their acquiring the slightest prac¬ 
tical knowledge are competent veterinary examiners. 
But the professor or his assistant are with them, who are 
assuredly competent to decide. Do, then, these human pmc- 
titioners need this controlling and guiding power ? Capable only 
of ascertaining the knowledge and possession of general prin¬ 
ciples, must they depend on others for the proper application of 
these principles to peculiar cases ? Then they are not qualified 
for their office. They should be enabled to decide fully, fairly, 
uninfluenced, unprompted, unguided. 
' The professor and his assistant! Have we a sufficient guarantee 
that their opinions on many points of veterinary physiology, and 
many more of medical treatment, shall always be perfectly correct ? 
Is it not an undoubted fact that the treatment of several diseases 
adopted by the college, and perhaps necessarily adopted, from the 
original faulty constitution of the school, is advocated by no 
writer, and is uniformly changed and discarded when the pupil 
gets into practice; and must be so, or he would inevitably starve ? 
Have we always, or, while human nature and human weakness 
remain as they are, can we have a sufficient guarantee, that the 
professor and his assistant shall have no favourites to put foward. 
