OPENING OF THE MELBOURNE VETERINARY COLLEGE. 
89 
rests to a great extent wtih stock-owners themselves, and one of 
the main objects of this establishment is to give sons of stock- 
owners, and others who intend following pastoral pursuits, an op¬ 
portunity of acquiring practical as well as theoretical knowledge 
regarding the causes and nature of animal diseases that will enable 
them to select sound, healthy animals to breed from, and so readi¬ 
ly detect any deviation from health in the animals under their 
immediate care, and discover the causes which give rise to it. Ani¬ 
mals, as well as human beings, have a language by which they can 
express their wants and desires, pains and pleasures—a language 
which is superior to our own, in that it contains no lie. It will be 
one of the most important parts of our duty to teach you how to 
interpret this language, so that you may be able to attach the cor¬ 
rect meaning to the various expressions it contains. Those of you 
who intend following the calling of veterinary surgeons will find 
that your future will depend to a great extent on the facility and 
success with which you can diagnose the various diseases of ani¬ 
mals. It has often been said that it is more difficult to determine 
the character of a disease affecting an animal than in the case of 
human beings. This I hold to be contrary to fact. Whatever 
information we are able to obtain from the symptoms expressed by 
a sick animal may be relied upon as being real and truthful. Ani¬ 
mals, unlike human beings, seldom dissemble, and are not influenced 
to the same extent by imaginary complaints. Our difficulty does 
not rest with the animals themselves, but with the grooms, drivers, 
or others in attendance upon them, who, to cover some error or 
fault of their own, are prone to throw us off the right track as to 
the cause or character of a disease or injury, so that information 
obtained from this source has often to be taken with great reser¬ 
vation. I believe it is now the custom in several of the Conti¬ 
nental schools to teach medical students how to diagnose animal 
diseases before allowing them to practise on human beings, and 
there has recently been some agitation in England in regard to 
adopting a similar method of teaching. To an unprejudiced mind 
there can be no doubt about the beneficial effect of such a training 
upon the students, as it must tend to a higher development of the 
perceptive faculties, and to less dependence being placed on what 
