164 
THE VETERINARIAN, MARCH 1 , 1835 . 
Ne quid falsi dlcere audeat, ne quid veri non audeat.—Cicr.uo. 
The first portion of our Journal is exclusively devoted to 
matters of practice, or to subjects immediately connected with 
it. In “ the leading article” we allow ourselves a wider range, 
and are limited only by the interests of our art. If there are any 
inquiries that more than others occupy our anxious, fearful, de¬ 
lighted attention, they are the actual state of our profession—the 
obstacles that oppose its onward march—and its slow, irregular, 
but evidently assured progress towards the station which it ought 
to occupy. 
Confined to a chamber of pain, we w'ere seeking, and then 
always most successfully, a short interval of ease, by abandoning 
ourselves, no, not to a series of day-dreams, but to the consi¬ 
deration of a subject which we were pledged to resume, the 
actual state of our 'profession:'’^ and we were, in our mind’s eye, 
giving to our leader for March some form and substance, when 
a knock at our sanctum disturbed us, and a small pamphlet was 
placed on our table, entitled, “ A Concise Account of Veterinarif 
Surgery, its Schools and Practitioners, for the Benefit of Pro¬ 
prietors of domesticated Animals: by a Veterinary Surgeon. 
Published by Andrew Rutherglen and Co., Glasgow, and 
Simpkin and Marshall, London.” It was a neat modest-looking 
little work. Price I 5 . 
It was the very subject on which we had been ruminating. 
The fire was stirred—the cushioned chair adapted a little more 
conveniently—and the paper-knife called into exercise. We had 
not read the whole of the first page before we were convinced 
that it was the work of a man of talent, and of a zealous and 
liberal veterinarian; and ere we had skimmed more than a page 
or two, we determined to make a review of it the subject of our 
leading article. 
The author commences with a faithful sketch of what veterinary 
surgery now is in the estimation of society generally. Worse 
definitions have been constructed than that which a veterinary 
surgeon gave when he said his profession was ‘ that science 
