139 
M 
~ AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON. 
an accurate, and useful, and profitable knowledge of these ani¬ 
mals will be easily built. From ignorance of some first princi¬ 
ples, how many of my hearers have sutfered in their comfort, 
their pocket, and their pride! . 
Lectures like these must be interesting, as enabling the owner 
of the horse and of cattle to overlook his own stable and farm,— 
and to rid himself of that most unnatural and intolerable of all 
nuisances, the tyranny of the bailiff or the groom ; and to be 
master of that portion of his establishment with which his plea¬ 
sure and his interest are so much concerned. 1 have heard gen¬ 
tlemen of rank, and influence, and talent, confess that they 
dared not do what they pleased in their own stables. They have 
blushed at the dishonourable and abject slavery to which they 
were reduced, but they had not courage to throw off the yoke. 
Tyranny here, as every where else, was founded on ignorance. 
The master knew not the proper management of the stable, or 
the qualities, or the diseases of the horse—he was fearful of 
committing himself, and shrunk from the sneer of his menial. 
On this lanorance of the master has been founded a system of 
stable management, absurd, cruel, and destructive to the ani¬ 
mal, and unnecessarily expensive to the owner. I will, how ¬ 
ever, do those who have the management of the stable and the 
farm the justice to say, that many of them have, in the ventila¬ 
tion of the stable, and in the comparative disuse of over-training, 
over-physicking, and over-feeding*, adopted a mode of treatment 
less injurious to the animal, and more consistent with the in¬ 
terest of the master: but they who have penetrated into the 
mystery of the stable and the farm, will still recognise many a 
relic of ignorance and barbarism; and, after all, there is, in the 
best conducted establishment, nothing like the superintendence 
of the master ; while that, to be effective and profitable, must be 
founded on knowledge of the matter. 
But I w-ill place the utility of these lectures on a broader basis. 
Ours is an agricultural as well as a commercial country. Its 
staple riches are its soil, and the productions of its soil. It is more 
decidedly an agricultural country than others that have scarcely 
a vestige of commerce. There are in Great Britain twenty- 
nine more horses to every thousand inhabitants than in France, 
and nearly double the number of sheep and oxen. 
In a statistical account of England and Wales by Geoff rey King, 
and published in 1896, when the population was supposed to be 
only 5,500,000, and the whole rental of the kingdom £ 12,000,000, 
the number of oxen was calculated at 4,500,000, and of sheep 
at 11,000,000; and their value, averaged at 2d. per lb, w as more 
than £13,000,000 sterling; but now that our population is more 
than doubled, and the value of money so much increased, we 
