500 
ON THE ARMY VETERINARY DEPARTMENT. 
for liis duty. Here great responsibility attaches to the veterinary 
surgeon; and, moreover, it is a duty for which an experienced 
eye alone can be considered to be duly qualified. 
Having advanced so much on the importance or utility of our 
art (for I take it, that the one may well weigh with the other), 
I shall proceed to speak briefly of its “ respectability,” in refe¬ 
rence, at least, to the army. 
It strikes me, that if the veterinary profession owes what 
respectability it possesses to any one set of men more than another, 
such acknowledgment is due to the army veterinary department. 
Not that I mean by such an assumption to cast any reflection 
upon the members who are not in the army, or that I mean to 
affirm that the credit thus reflected upon the body of army vete¬ 
rinary surgeons is due, exclusively, to the individuals who com¬ 
pose that body. 
There cannot be a question that, when King George III con¬ 
ferred commissions upon veterinary surgeons in the army, his 
good and gracious intention was to induce gentlemen—i. e. men 
of education and respectability—to qualify themselves for such 
stations ; and, certainly, so far as the encouragement has gone to 
incline some such individuals to qualify themselves for the com¬ 
missions, the regal endowment has had its effect- But, for all 
this, the act has failed, lamentably failed, in completing its full 
intentions, because a minor power has been allowed to step in 
between the royal grant and the actual execution of it, by which 
the current, pure at its source, and intended to flow with purity 
and lustre to its end, has suffered foul and noxious pollution. 
Character and education, nay, even eminent professional qua¬ 
lifications, have met with no preference in the election of army 
veterinary surgeons: private considerations have trodden down 
all merit and meritorious right; and the army has been disgraced 
with the appointment of grooms and common blacksmiths, and 
men of low character and education. 
This has been found to work in unison with the other part of 
the same system; viz. the admission and encouragement of pupils 
from the low and illiterate classes of society. Stables, black- 
smiths’ shops, and the out-at-elbow fraternities, and insolvent 
debtors courts, have annually supplied the Veterinary College with 
too great a proportion of its pupils; and so favourable has been 
the constant reception of such aspirants, that the supply has, per¬ 
haps, rather augmented than fallen off. How can it be wondered 
at, then, that we have had such mauvaissujets in the army? for 
did these gentry not meet with some reward for their twenty 
guineas (paid as fee to Mr. Coleman), the influx of pupils, from 
such quarters at least, might suffer a lamentable diminution. 
