MR. YOUATT’S INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 605 
be permitted to devote my time and industry to what purpose 1 
please. 
Ours is a profession young* in improvement. Its principles are 
scarcely fixed. Our list of diseases not agreed upon ; the nature 
of many of them disputed; and the treatment of them as various 
as our conceptions of their origin. A lecturer on human medi¬ 
cine is enabled, and is expected, to give the result of the com¬ 
bined experience of the medical world; but so little has been 
the intercourse between veterinarians, until societies and perio¬ 
dicals have, within the last three years, brought us more to¬ 
gether, that a lecturer among us can scarcely teach more than 
his ow n theory and practice, and those w idely different, perhaps, 
from the theory and practice of many of his brethren. It w ill be 
advantageous, then, for the veterinary pupil from the college 
to learn what others think and do. A comparison of the state¬ 
ments and reasonings of different instructors will enable him to 
form a more correct opinion on many important points ; and may 
save him the perplexity and mortification of discovering, when 
practice leaves him little time for study, how r different are the 
principles which were once inculcated on him from those which 
daily experience and the testimony of others force on his mind. 
If to my present course of lectures I add the horse, which was 
omitted in my last course, it is because some who then attended 
me w ill recollect how often I w as compelled to refer to the horse 
for illustration of difference in the character and treatment of va¬ 
rious diseases; and because circumstances have induced me some¬ 
what to extend the scope of my lectures, and to address myself 
no longer exclusively to veterinary pupils, who could hear of 
the horse elsewhere, but to amateurs, who would justly expect 
that I should teach the structure and diseases of all domestic 
animals, and to whom the horse, probably, would be far more 
interesting than cattle or sheep; and because I should not be 
able to discharge my duty to the medical student, if I did not 
speak of the difference of structure, and function, and disease, 
and its treatment, in every animal that we have subdued. 
I have, however, a better reason for looking to the veterinary 
pupil for some support, and even for my principal encourage¬ 
ment. The prospectus of the Veterinary College states, that 
“ the grand object of the institution has been to form a school 
of veterinary science, in w hich the anatomical structure of qua¬ 
drupeds of all kinds, horses, cattle , sheep , dogs , <5yc., the diseases 
to which they ate subject, and the remedies proper to be ap¬ 
plied, may be investigated and regularly taught, in order that, 
by these means, enlightened practitioners of liberal education, 
whose whole study has been devoted to the veterinary art in all 
