56 
VETER1NARY JU RISPRUDENCE. 
certain in medicine. But I ask, where is the veterinarian who,when 
called upon to give an opinion of the state of a lame horse, and 
to indicate the cause of the lameness, will not say in his certifi¬ 
cate, that it arises from these bony enlargements, when such en¬ 
largements are evident in the horse he is examining. To form 
any other conclusion would be as unreasonable as to hesitate to 
acknowledge as the cause of lameness the prick of a nail in the 
foot of a horse that before the accident was not lame. For 
myself, I should not for a moment hesitate to pronounce that a 
horse, lame behind, and that had his hock surrounded by bony 
tumours, was lame in consequence of these exostoses, unless I 
saw some other plain and manifest cause of lameness. 
Bi/ the same. 
Intermittent Ophthalmia — Ought a Horse to be 
RETURNED FOR IT UNDER ALL CIRCUMSTANCES? 
Certainly not. If the horse was blind before the sale, or his 
vision materially affected in consequence of cataracts, that would 
not have escaped the observation of a careful purchaser. The 
buyer has no right to set aside the sale because inflammation 
may have returned, for, under such circumstances, this inflam¬ 
mation cannot be said to lessen the value of the horse; nor is 
any injury done by the seller, or at least the judges will not sup¬ 
pose so, even although the buyer should affirm that he thought he 
had purchased a horse with two sound eyes. Neither can the 
purchaser say, as has happened in many instances, that he was 
aware that he bought a horse with two cataracts, but did not 
mean to buy one that had periodical ophthalmia. This manner 
of defending the thing has its advocates among some veterina¬ 
rians, but there is too much of quibbling, and too little of justice 
about it; and it has not, so far as I am aware, succeeded before 
any of the tribunals. 
If a horse has a cataract in one eye, and he is, after the pur¬ 
chase, attacked with periodical ophthalmia in both eyes, I think 
that he may be returned ; for, in that case, the renewed inflam¬ 
mation does lessen the value of the animal; but no person, so far 
as my knowledge extends, has hitherto contested this case. 
A horse, one or both of whose eyes present some visible lesions, 
as the mark of some former ulceration {leucoma )—a spot—a 
cloudiness—a partial opacity of the crystalline lens, can he be 
considered as subject to periodical ophthalmia, and, therefore, 
returned if inflammation reappears? Most certainly ; because it is 
the nature of ophthalmia to be intermittent, periodical; and be¬ 
cause these traces of former disease render it probable that more 
serious lesions w’ill follow, and terminate in total blindness, and 
thus materially diminish the value of the animal. I should found 
