THE EARLY HISTORY OF VETERINARY MEDICINE. 349 
order to get rid of the last, viz. to hold crushed bags under the 
nose of the animals. Columella believes that bad digestion is the 
cause of the formation of worms in the calf. He also describes 
a machine by means of which cattle may be confined, so that 
remedies may be administered to them, and which very satis¬ 
factorily proves the care which agriculturists and veterinary sur¬ 
geons had at that time bestowed on cattle. 
After these productions and labours in the time of Augustus, 
it would have been expected that veterinary medicine would 
have attained to a high degree of perfection among the Romans; 
but the state of decline which commenced in the second century 
was fatal to this as well as to every other science. A writer, 
named Gargilius Martial, who lived in the third century, has 
left us a fragment on the maladies of cattle, that proves that 
veterinary medicine had not progressed after the time of Colu¬ 
mella, but had rather, to a considerable degree, retrograded. 
This little work bears the impression of the lack of science, 
which was the character of that age, and does not deserve 
farther consideration. 
The Greeks bestowed the knowledge of veterinary medicine on 
the Romans, in the same manner that they had imparted to them 
every other science. The Romans have merely treated on it 
in the manner which their masters had described it, but had 
scarcely added any thing. In the four centuries that followed 
the time of Columella, the veterinary art fell into great decay 
among the Greeks, and there was not an author worthy of 
record among the Romans. We may, therefore, be surprised at 
the appearance of Publius Vegetius, about the end of the fourth 
century. His work is exceedingly valuable. We must not, 
however, confound this Vegetius, of whose life we have no 
historv, with another writer of the same name, who has left a 
treatise on the military art. Whatever was the station of life 
which the author of whom we are now about to speak occu¬ 
pied, we cannot deny that he had much experience in, and 
knowledge of, the diseases of the horse. He shews that he 
has profited by a diligent reading of his predecessors, the Greek 
veterinarians; and the style of his work, written in Latin, is not 
3 n 
VOL. VIII. 
