88 VETERINARY MEETINGS AND TRANSACTIONS. 
Society’^ of the College. The professors attended, and Mr. Cole¬ 
man presided, not only by express invitation, but in virtue of 
the offices which they held, as president and vice-president of 
the society. Mr. Coleman, who used to contribute,—unsolicited, 
unexpected, but gratefully received,—his quota of champagne 
or of cash—can bear witness to this. Mr. Coleman behaved 
very handsomely about these dinners; and, surely, Mr. Sewell 
cannot forget that, at the very first of them, he and the re¬ 
porter were brother-stewaids ; and that he was the chairman 
and the reporter his vice at the very pleasant tasting and settling 
snuggeries, which, in the usual routine, precede and follow the 
grand day. It is impossible that he can forget the clever way in 
which he shifted from his own shoulders to those of his vice, the 
task or the honour, or whatever be its proper appellation, of 
returning thanks for the stewards : he, doubtless, occasionally 
chuckles at it even now, and the reporter has many a hearty 
laugh to himself in private about it. 
The medical teachers were invited to that dinner; for what¬ 
ever might be opinion, pretty plainly expressed even then by 
some of us, that we ought to have all we wanted within our own 
walls, we nevertheless owed those gentlemen much respect and 
gratitude. 
It was the Anniversary Dinner of the Veterinary Medical 
Society,’’ and not of the students ; for a considerable portion of 
the students did not belong to the society—they did not know 
whether they dared to belong to it, and certainly not more than 
half of them attended the first dinner. The establishment of the 
society was a w’ork of no little labour, and the scheme was—to 
use the mildest term—somewhat doubtfully regarded, at first, by 
the powers that were; but they behaved honourably and well 
afterwards. However, the society and its dinner once coun¬ 
tenanced by the notables, (it is shameful that that should be an 
inferior consideration in all these things) and working well, 
and contributing to the manifest improvement of the students, 
it very soon became a matter of course that the student must 
be a member of the society ; and this dinner became a dinner of 
the studentSj yet even then not exclusively so, for in the re¬ 
porter’s time the stewards of that dinner were eagerly sought 
after among those who had passed the ordeal, and were esta¬ 
blished as practitioners in the metropolis and its neighbourhood, 
and so it more properly was a dinner of the profession generally. 
When or how it became a dinner given by the veterinary pupils, 
and by them alone, to their professors, and medical teachers and 
examiners, the reporter does not know, and is not anxious to 
inquire; his only object is to vindicate the origin of the meeting. 
