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Foreign Extracts. 
We have received the French and German veterinary journals 
up to October. 
Report of the Committee appointed to inquire into the Teaching 
and Practice of Veterinary Medicine in France to the Citizen 
Minister of Agriculture and Commerce. 
Citizen Minister,—One of your predecessors in the agricultural 
department having appointed a special committee for the purpose 
of examining into the state of legislation affecting the teaching and 
practice of the veterinary art, and of proposing such modifications 
therein as shall seem fitting; 
This Committee sat the 4th April, presided over by M. Renault, 
director of the Alfort School, the vice-president being M. Bouilland, 
dean of the faculty of Paris. 
To divide the labour two sub-committees were appointed, and 
two distinct questions submitted for their consideration, the results 
of which they have now the honour of laying before you. 
Report of the Sub-Committee appointed to examine into the 
Teaching of Veterinary Medicine in France. 
History of Veterinary Science. 
Veterinary medicine, regarded as a science and an art, dates no 
farther back, properly speaking, than the conclusion of the last 
century. 
The savans of antiquity, in such of their writings as have been 
handed down to us, have made full mention, it is true, of some of 
the maladies to which beasts are obnoxious, and of the means thev 
t/ 
deemed proper to combat them. The poets likewise have inspired 
their verses with accounts of fatal epizootics which, in their time, 
desolated agriculture. The arts of breeding, rearing, and feeding 
domestic animals have also found interpreters among them. But 
these early outlines of veterinary science become effaced and obli¬ 
terated in the disturbances and under the obscurity of the middle 
age, and for a long series of years no vestiges even of them are 
met with. 
Veterinary science shared the fate of the husbandman’s art, 
which became, in these times of profound ignorance, the hinder- 
