THE 
VETERINARIAN. 
VOL. XXXV. 
No.419. 
NOVEMBER, 1862. 
Fourth Series. 
No. 95. 
Communications and Cases. 
OPENING OF THE SESSION AT THE ROYAL 
VETERINARY COLLEGE. 
INAUGURAL ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR SIMONDS. 
Gentlemen, —I do not know that I can better impress 
upon the minds of those of you who occupy these benches 
for the first time the true importance of the studies you are 
about to commence, or hold out greater inducements for 
renewed energy to those who have already passed a Session 
here, than by pointing out, at the very commencement of this 
address, one or two considerations arising from the recent 
appearance of smallpox among the flocks of this country. I 
do not propose, however, to enter into any detailed history of 
the outbreak. This is not the occasion, neither has the time 
come, when such a history might be rightly presented. I am 
wishful rather to direct your attention to the relation which 
sucli formidable manifestations of disease have upon the 
welfare of the community, and the duty of the veterinary 
practitioner in reference to them. It is by observing similar 
wide and destructive irruptions of fatal maladies among 
our flocks and herds that we best learn the dignity of 
veterinary science, as also the true place and highest office of 
the veterinary surgeon in a community. 
Smallpox is unhappily still so familiar and so deadly 
among the population of this kingdom, that the youngest 
tyro is not unacquainted with the dread nature of the malady 
which the term indicates. The allied,disease among sheep, 
less familiarly known, is not less—nay, it is even more—fatal 
in its progress than its human congener. Before 1847 the 
malady had not been observed among the flocks of this 
kingdom during the present generation, but it had long been 
prevalent and was well known in several of the great sheep 
districts of the continent. In some, in fact, the affection 
xxxv. 44 
