640 bourgelat’s introductory lecture. 
I - , , V ^ '• ■ ' • I f " *-■ " 
Veterinary medicine, then, exacts acquirements equal to those 
expected from the human practitioner: nay, we are compelled to 
enter into researches and details much longer, and much more 
difficult; for our study is not bounded by one animal, but it em¬ 
braces many useful and valuable ones, and the construction of 
which, and, consequently, their functions and diseases, are widely 
different. Our labours are multiplied whichever way we turn our 
view; yet when we perceive amidst the difference of mechanism the 
bearing on one point, one important point, the perfect discharge 
of function, it is then that there are cleared up in our minds (and 
we can best, we alone can clear them up) many ah interesting 
question of physiology and of medicine too, on which those who 
were ignorant of the influence of different organization on healthy 
and diseased function had pronounced erroneously, and as posi¬ 
tive as falsely. 
Another great advantage which the veterinary art enjoys, is 
that of not being infected with the poison of hypothesis—a poison 
which, being transmitted, if we may so say, from the mind of 
the physician in which it was nourished into the veins of the 
patient, has occasioned a thousand murders every day. None of 
the sects ardent for the establishment and triumph of a crowd of 
opposite opinions, to which credulous and weak humanity will 
always be the only victim, have yet encroached on our domain. 
The art is yet in its infancy: we wander as yet in darkness, 
, where simple reason, bereft of every succour, cannot protect 
itself from the snares held out to blind it—where we know no¬ 
thing but a vague routine, and where we carry our error so far as 
even sometimes to substitute for causes which we cannot dis- 
% cover, the foolish ideas of incantation and magic : but this 
sombre obscurity, so distant in appearance from the truths we 
seek, misleads us far less than those false lights issuing from a 
crowd of luminaries, which dazzle and blind the imagination more 
than they assist and clear it. 
But how shall we preserve ourselves from these dangerous 
rocks of science, whence we may be precipitated in our danger¬ 
ous wanderings ? We can accomplish this only by conquering 
that self-love which seems to delight in concealing from us those 
