THE EARLY HISTORY OF VETERINARY MEDICINE. 347 
effectual method, to extract them from the fundament with the 
fingers. 
Many of the writers whose names occur in this collection, 
practised other arts connected with veterinary medicine. At 
that time veterinary medicine was not separated from the study 
and pursuit of rural economy generally. Cato, a superstitious 
person, and a careless observer, wrote much which had relation 
to agriculture alone. In all the diseases of cattle, without dis¬ 
tinction, he recommends that a raw egg should be given to the 
animal, and he adds, that the servant who gives that egg should 
be a young man. He was a great partisan of magical formulae, 
and he had no faith in any but popular remedies. He recom¬ 
mended, as a practice known from the earliest times, the injec¬ 
tion of medicines up the nostrils of animals. 
Praxamus, a Greek author, who probably lived before Colu¬ 
mella, in the century before Christ, and who seems to have 
principally followed the works of Mago and Hamilcar, Cartha¬ 
ginian writers, regards an exact knowledge of the diseases of 
animals as impossible. He distinguishes, however, several dis¬ 
eases in cattle, as apoplexy, diarrhoea, indigestion, and colic. 
He manifests in general considerable talent, proving that the 
spirit of observation which distinguished the Greeks might 
have been attended by important results, if other circumstances 
had been favourable. 
The loss of the work of Celsus on rural economy is much to 
be regretted. It doubtless contained a treatise on the diseases 
of domestic animals; and we cannot help believing that this 
man, so well-informed, and more exempt from prejudice than 
any other Roman, w'ould have shewn the same judgment which 
he has exhibited in his work on medicine, and would have 
united in one regular work all the fragments which are scattered 
through so many tracts. 
We are, in some part, recompensed for the loss of the vete¬ 
rinary medicine of Celsus, by the possession of the work of 
Columella, his contemporary, on rural economy generally. He 
profited much by the writings of Celsus, and has treated on 
veterinary medicine in the profound and complete manner which 
