418 
EDITORIAL O BS E R VAT IO N S. 
apart for extra pay for remount duty. This in our service is not 
officially announced or even acknowledged, though there hardly 
exists a regiment of British Cavalry in which the veterinary 
surgeon is not, more dr less, employed in the procuring or pur¬ 
chasing of’ remount horses. We do not mean to allege that regi¬ 
mental veterinary officers are not remunerated for this additional 
duty; we only say, no official notice is taken of such service in 
ours as in the French army regulations; a circumstance which in 
our eyes amounts to an omission, since the requirements of the 
veterinary surgeon in that department are sufficiently acknow¬ 
ledged by the calls continually made upon him. Whether the 
present mode pursued of obtaining remount horses be the 
preferable one or not, is a question which has, both in military 
and veterinary quarters, been productive of some differences of 
opinion, and this on some occasions has been followed up by the 
suggestion of other schemes and plans for the purpose. 
It will be seen, we have received another communication 
from Mr. Hurford, V.S. 15th Hussars, on the subject of the 
utility or efficacy of gentian root as an “ auxiliary cathartic.” 
It will be remembered that, so far back as October 1851, we 
published part of a letter we had received from this gentleman, 
then at Bangalore, in India, with his regiment; and that in the 
month after, November, there appeared in The VETERINARIAN 
letters from Messrs. Howell and Brown, confirmatory of the 
opinions of Mr. Hurford : the former promising at the time to 
forward for publication an account of some experiments he had 
made to test the gentian. These, as will have been discovered, 
are now come to hand. 
Mr. Hurford, in his letter, regrets the “apathy” of the pro¬ 
fession on a subject which, we must for our own part confess, 
seemed calculated in our eyes to command attention. Our 
staple cathartic being aloes, and this being in such extensive 
and every-day use among us, we should have thought that any 
thing said to possess the property of adding efficacy to it, or of 
rendering it equally efficacious in diminished doses, would have 
quickly drawn down sundry remarks thereupon. Some may say, 
and with truth enough, there is nothing new m medicine in the 
fact of simple bitters, of themselves, in our own persons at 
