602 
MR. YOUATT’s INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 
both of them that veterinary science was, at that time, held in 
due estimation, and that it extended to all domestic animals. 
In the best ag*es of Rome our art eminently flourished. The 
father of the patriot Cato, and Terentius Varro, and the sweet 
poet Virgil, have left us treatises on veterinary affairs, interest¬ 
ing’ from the matter which they contain, from the illustrious 
names with which our art is associated, and from the testimony 
which each affords of what ought to be the extent and scope 
of the veterinarian’s study and practice. 
About the commencement of the Christian sera Columella 
produced a work on agricultural and veterinary matters; and, 
300 years afterwards, we learn that veterinary surgeons were 
appointed to each cavalry regiment in the Roman service. They 
accompanied the victorious troops of Constantine when Byzan¬ 
tium was made the metropolis of the empire of the b]ast; and 
the works which no less than seventeen of these army veterina¬ 
rians have left behind them shew that they were, as veterinary 
surgeons of the present day ought to be, and will gradually be¬ 
come, men of education and science. 
Of one of them, whose waitings are peculiarly valuable, Ab- 
syrtus, we have the undeniable fact that he practised both as a 
human and a veterinary surgeon. This, indeed, would not suit 
the present very proper division of medical practice, nor w r ould it 
accord with the princely emoluments of many skilful or fortunate 
practitioners, but we recur to the fact as a proof of the estima¬ 
tion in which our art was then held, and that in the chief city of 
the eastern empire, and as a refutation of the erroneous and most 
unjustifiable assertion, repeated and acted upon, that a man me¬ 
dically educated cannot make a good veterinary surgeon, and is 
peculiarly unfit to be a cavalry-regimental officer. 
Sixty years after this flourished Vegetius, not a veterinary 
surgeon, but enthusiastically devoted to veterinary affairs ; and 
he has given us a far better book than did any even of our 
brethren who had gone before him, and likewise on every 
branch of our art. His work contains much of the knowledge 
of present times, and the description of many a mode of practice 
lately vaunted as important discoveries ; and he has added, and 
it proceeds from an impartial and a competent judge, and what 
every veterinarian proudly quotes, Ars veterinarian post me- 
cUemam, secunda est. This is not the actual, but the proper 
station of the veterinary profession : may every veterinarian trea¬ 
sure it in his memory, an incentive to improvement, a check to 
presumption. 
After this came the irruption of the Goths and Vandals, and 
a long night of darkness overshadowed both the medical and vq- 
