646 
NEW YORK STATE VETERINARY COLLEGE. 
consequently largely dominated by the financial results. The founders of such schools 
were met at the threshold by the imperative questions : 
Will the venture pay ? 
Can we secure fees enough to sustain it? 
Will the name of the college bring us greater and more remunerative practice ? 
Will the prospective fees, fame and practice warrant the investment ? 
The answer is necessarily dominated by the question of money and the temptation is 
great to subordinate the educational considerations. The pressure is heavy : / 
1st. To shorten the curriculum. 
2d. To admit ill-prepared candidates. 
3d. To graduate large numbers irrespective of fitness. 
4th. To further abridge the already short course (and as a final degradation), 
5th. To sell diplomas. 
do this last, lowest depth of sordidness more than one veterinary college in America 
has sunk. But short of this, even the surviving and honorable colleges have been one 
and all prevented from achieving the status which the nature of the subject demanded. 
1 he preliminary education and the trained mind which are necessary to the successful 
pursuit of the science, have not been required for matriculation, and the course has been 
abridged to such an extent that even a trained mind cannot successfully cover the required 
ground in the time allowed him. 
Meanwhile the field of veterinary science has been rapidly enlarging—deepening, 
widening and becoming more thoroughly cultivated, so that the insufficiency of the un¬ 
trained student and his short curriculum have become more and more marked year by year. 
1 he contrast with the schools of veterinary medicine on the continent of Europe will 
emphasize this statement. In entering a continental veterinary school the student must 
show that he has graduated from a real sktile, gymnasium or college, and he must pursue 
a veterinary course of three years and a half to five years of nine months each, ere he can 
hope to secure a degree. Add to this that the great advances in medicine have been such 
that the great majority of the students have to study one additional year ere they can secure 
the coveted diploma, and we can appreciate the hopeless inadequacy of a course of two or 
even three sessions of five or six months each, which has not been preceded by a mental 
training in high school or college. 
t hese continental veterinary colleges would have been no more thorough than the 
English or American had they been dependent on private enterprise. But there is no 
veterinary college on the continent of Europe to-day that is not a ward of the government. 
Each one has been founded and is sustained by the commonwealth just as are the army, 
the navy, the experiment farms, etc. I his paternalism is founded on a long experience of 
their value, of which I may be permitted to give a single example. 
The disease rinderpest, which confines its ravages to ruminants, and, as its name indi¬ 
cates, almost exclusively to cattle, formerly spread over most of Europe at frequent inter¬ 
vals, killing 20 to 95$ of the bovine race at a single invasion. Paulet tells us that in three 
years (1711-14) it cut oft 1,500,000 head of cattle, and Faust says that in the whole of 
Europe in four general invasions dating from 1711, it destroyed no less than 200,000,000 
head. At $20 per head this reaches the astounding sum of $4,000,000,000. So late as 
1844, according to Reynal, it destroyed 1,000,000 in southern Russia alone. 
d hanks to the veterinary profession of Europe, this disease can never again attain such 
boundless sway, and though still extended at intervals in the course of belligerent armies, 
or in the channels of trade, it is always met with intelligent measures of control and 
speedily suppressed. 
This is but one of the deadly plagues of the Old World, the ruinous extensions of 
which led, in 1762, to the establishing of the first European veterinary school, at Lyons, 
b ranee, under the presidency of Bourgelat. This was followed, a year later, by a second 
school, at Charenton, near Paris, and still later by a third at Toulouse. These were suc¬ 
ceeded by a score of others in the different countries of the continent, all at the national 
charge and under government control. They are justly looked upon as economic invest¬ 
ments, not only for the restriction and extinction of the plagues formerly so rife and fatal, 
but also for the conserving of the lives and efficiency of the horses of the cavalry and artiJ- 
lery, for the protection and fostering of the various animal industries, and indirectly, 
though no less certainly, for the permanent preservation of the fertility of the soil. 
