THE EDITORS TO THEIR READERS. 
221 
pied, whether the pardonable wish to obtain some literary repu¬ 
tation, or the noble ambition, to promote the improvement of that 
useful profession in which we had embarked our hopes and our 
fortunes. By one motive we should have been bad calculators if 
we had been influenced,—the hope of the more solid but not 
more valuable remuneration of literary labour. In the state of 
our profession, some years must have passed before that could 
have been realized. Four years have passed, and that hope 
would at the present moment have been utterly disappointed. We 
have, however, been rewarded. We have for a while, a little 
while indeed, rallied around us a Brown, a Cartwright, a Castley, 
a Dick, a Field, a Goodwin, a Green, a Hales, a Henderson, 
a Karkeek, a Kerr, a King, a Langworthy, a Molyneux, a Per* 
civall, a Quick, a Ralston, a Roberts, a Simpson, a Spooner, 
a Toombs, a Turner, a Wilkinson, a Watt, and many others of 
equal value. There is scarcely a disease of the horse which 
they, and many ingenious contributors, have not illustrated, and 
in the treatment of which they have not effected the most valu¬ 
able improvement; and as for cattle, their diseases, and the 
treatment of them, had never before been discussed among vete- 
rinarian3. There is not a recent publication which has not de¬ 
rived almost all its worth from The Veterinarian : we take 
the work of Mr. Blaine as an example—an excellent and duly 
prized one before ; but now, in a manner, invaluable, because he 
has deeply drawn from this source : and if we go to our schools, 
we boldly claim, as the work of veterinary periodicals, the length¬ 
ening of the period of the student’s education—the extending of 
that education, in a greater or less degree, to many a previously 
neglected but important object—and the modification, or even 
the abandonment of many a theory, visionary and injurious. 
These are our rewards, and we prize them. And now, if our 
former contributors wish that the world should believe that in 
England alone—the cradle of liberty, the nurse of science—ve¬ 
terinary practitioners have not the ability, or, worse than that, 
the honest pride to support one poor periodical; if, while we are 
claiming some consanguinity with the professor of human medi¬ 
cine, they really mean to give him the irrefragable proof that we 
are unworthy of it, either from absolute incapacity or scandalous 
vol. v. ii h 
