460 
VETERINARY SURGEONS 
which the veterinary practitioner is held. Is it that which is 
satisfactory to us? When a young veterinary surgeon settles in 
a village or town, is so much importance in the public mind 
attached to the title which he assumes, that the stable of the 
gentleman or the sporting man is opened to him, and the empire of 
the groom and the farrier is at an end? Is the name of veterinary 
surgeon a passport to practice? No—far from it. And why not? 
Because there has not been time for the value of the profession 
to be duly estimated; because the prejudices of grooms and 
masters will very slowly yield to the strongest evidence. We are> 
perhaps, a little too impatient—we are expecting that to be done 
in a moment, which in other cases is a work of time, and of a 
long time too. But is the veterinary surgeon what he might 
have been, and what he ought to be? We have said that he 
ought to be a horseman. There are a thousand little but im¬ 
portant things about the horse which long acquaintance with 
that animal can alone teach; and who can handle a bullock that 
* 
has not been used to the farm-yard ? Do all veterinary surgeons 
know how to go up to the horse, or to handle the bullock, or, the 
moment they enter the stable or the farm-yard does not the 
groom or the bailiff detect and sneer at their awkwardness and 
ignorance? If it were not invidious, and if the very persons to 
whom we refer were not aware, painfully aware of their deficiency, 
and labouring hard and honourably to overcome it, we could pro¬ 
duce a list of many scores who had scarcely seen a horse, and 
certainly never handled a bullock before they entered the 
veterinary college, and yet in six or nine months were dubbed 
veterinary surgeons. It was an infamous system. We scruti¬ 
nize not the motives that led to its adoption; but this presto-pass 
manufactory of veterinary surgeons was the bane of the profes¬ 
sion ;—this multiplication of incompetent practitioners degraded 
it in the estimation of the master, and made it the laughing-stock 
of the farrier and the groom. 
The strong feeling of the profession and of the public has, how¬ 
ever, here prevailed ; and a twelvemonth’s what?—attend¬ 
ance on the lectures of the college ? No ! for the student may go 
quietly home again, or he may go where he pleases—but the lapse 
of a twelvemonth from the payment of the twenty guinea fee is re- 
