LETTER TO SIR ASTLEY COOPER. 451 
committee, return for answer—That a law of the Veterinary- 
College limits the examining committee to those who deliver or 
have delivered lectures on subjects connected* with the veterinary 
art ; and the committee do not see that any alteration of this law 
is at present necessary/^ This is the reply you make us in the 
current year. On a fonner occasion, in the year 1823, I beg to 
remind you, that, on the same proposition being submitted to you, 
you answered us as follows :—That, by the existing laws of the 
institution, the medical examining committee are precluded from 
making any alteration in the constitution of their board ; and 
that as medical science has, for thirty years, eminently flourished 
under the present system of education and examination, the com¬ 
mittee are decidedly of opinion, that they cannot with propriety 
recommend to the general meeting of the governors of the college 
the adoption of the alteration you propose, as they are persuaded 
it would not tend to promote either the reputation of the college 
or improvement of the pupils.^’ 
Thus it appears that, in 1823, you tell us ou?' services are not 
required; and five years afterwards inform us, that, even w^ere 
they desirable, w^e are ineligible as examiners, from the circum¬ 
stance of our not being lecturers on subjects connected with the 
veterinary aii:.^^ If you felt satisfied with the truth and justness 
of your first report, why abandon it for an old and (as I shall pre¬ 
sently show you) now obsolete law of the college?—a law of 
whose existence you would all of you have remained ignorant 
up to this veiy moment, had not- accidentally discovered 
it again ] for even he himself had long lost sight of it. 
Since you have relinquished the reasons you assigned for ex¬ 
cluding us in your first report, by adopting fresh and altogether 
different ones in the- report for the present year, I do not feel 
myself called on to make any comment on the former; I shall, 
therefore, pass on to the further consideration of the latter. 
Pray, Sir Astley, do not suffer your reason to be so fettered, as 
for a moment to imagine that this law^^ (although it most 
assuredly does stand in the college book of regulations, like some 
others now equally dormant) was ever intended to have any relation 
to the present times and circumstances ! No more was it designed 
for opemtion now, than the laws of your own profession about 
barber-surgeons. It was enacted at an epoch when the veteri¬ 
nary profession was just emerging from the most abject condi¬ 
tion of servility and ignorance; when no veterinarian, among 
the few that existed, could be found anywise qualified for such a 
post as an examinership. Under such circumstances, its bene¬ 
ficial effects became manifest; for, had not the governors passed 
such a law, the consequence must have been, as they sagaciously 
foresaw, that the veterinary pupil would have been launched 
