HOMEOPATHY IN VETERINARY PRACTICE. 
617 
To be consistent with these principles and to obey this thera¬ 
peutic law we must experiment upon the various classes of the 
lower animals to find what drug's will produce symptoms similar 
to the symptoms of diseases we desire to cure. But has this been 
done for veterinary homeopathy ? (if I may be permitted to use 
the expression). Some authors on veterinary materia medica 
are silent on this point. Another speaks of careful provings 
having been made, but we have seen no record. But we know 
that animals have been utilized by the regular school as well as 
the homeopathic to demonstrate the toxic power of remedies to 
be used in the treatment of human diseases. 
But, admitting for the sake of argument that careful prov¬ 
ings have been made upon different species of the lower ani¬ 
mals, the results obtained are meagre, since only the objective 
symptoms produced by the drug can be noted. But some of the 
objective symptoms thus noted are unreliable, especially such as 
relate to the disposition and movement of the animal. Here it 
requires the discrimination of the prover to determine whether 
this class of objective phenomena are the primary result of the 
drug or are secondary to some influence produced by the drug. 
Hence the symptoms which may be considered reliable, ob¬ 
tained by proving drugs upon the lower animals, are those indi¬ 
cated by the pulse, pupil, conjunctiva, the visible mucous mem¬ 
branes, the skin and the excrements of the body. But the 
therapeutic laws of Hahnemann demand all possible symptoms 
obtainable from the action of a drug on every organ and tissue 
of the body. The subjective symptoms are, therefore, indis¬ 
pensable in a system in which symptoms are everything and 
morbid conditions and causes are nothing. u They fancied,” 
says Hahnemann, “ they could find the cause of disease, but 
they did not find it, because it is unrecognizable, and not to be 
found, since by far the greater number of diseases are of a dy¬ 
namic (spirit-like) origin and nature ; their cause, therefore, re¬ 
maining unrecognizable.” 
Observe that in the second part of the law quoted from the 
“ Organon,” it declares that the totality of the symptoms is the 
