20 
HISTORY Of VETERINARY SCIENCE 
most of the arts, as those who practised it became the most de¬ 
based and wretched of men. Thus, what prejudices, errors, blind 
and superstitious faith, absurd and insensate practices, have not 
succeeding ages heaped upon our science 1 How could it be 
otherwise 1 
Throughout the whole of the middle age, down to the end of the 
17th century, the sole depository of veterinary science, which had 
not passed unenlightened under the pens of ancient authors, was 
no more than an ignorant clown, having no traditions save those of 
a blind routine, and no inspirations save those arising from his own 
instinct or the instinct of the brutes with which, in his miserable 
life, he found himself associated. This was the shepherd, the 
neat-herd, or the blacksmith, or else that species of witch (VatRs 
de has etage), the depraved and debased successor of the priests of 
the oracles, and, like them, pretending to derive all his science from 
intimate communication with the powers of darkness, whose con¬ 
fidant and interpreter he represented himself to be. 
In the hands of adepts like these, what could animal medicine 
amount to, but to an incongruous and monstrous jumble of errors, 
such as the human mind might be expected to bring forth, plunged 
as it was into the darkest ignorance, without a light to direct it, in 
the presence of some of the most difficult problems of nature, of 
which, constituted as our intellect is, the necessity of solution is 
constantly recurring. The few books which the preceding age has 
left us, even those that were written during the most brilliant epochs 
of the emancipation of the human mind in the 17th and 18th 
centuries, give proofs of the impuissance and sterility of every 
effort directed to this end, at a time when man was without method 
in experiment, and that he set about the interpretation of the phe¬ 
nomena of nature in accordance with some preconceived ideas of 
his own. 
These books, in fact, barring some pages upon which the light of 
observation has shone, and has dissipated the darkness from, are 
but a mass of error and false doctrine repulsive to the reader, 
were it not that he feels that their defects are less ascribable to the 
genius of the writers than to the fallacious methods they con¬ 
ceived themselves bound by. Thus, in the middle even of the 
eighteenth century, a science so important and prolific, that it com¬ 
prised within its domain the organization of animals subservient to 
domestication, no longer existed. It was no more than an intelli¬ 
gent sort of quackery, regulated by places and circumstances. 
The invention and constitution of veterinary science form one 
of the glories of France in the eighteenth century. 
