CORRESPONDENCE. 
867 
With Dr. Salmon’s views on educational matters I cannot 
agree at all. I readily give him credit for what he has done for 
the veterinary profession in a practical way. He has fought hot 
battles with adversaries at home and abroad, and stood firm in 
many a hard time, and had skill enough to come off on top of 
many other difficulties which would have swept minor men 
away. But as a veterinary pedagogue I have little faith in him 
as yet. I fully believe his views are honest, but if so his prem¬ 
ises are wrong and therefore his conclusions void. 
Nobody has assailed the two-year graduates as quacks in our 
last meeting at Philadelphia. What was said was an outflow of 
the general drift of opinion within the veterinary profession of 
the present day. The old argument that some excellent men 
have come out of two-year schools we all know and adknowl- 
edge. But I would rather twist my bad English and say in 
spite of the two-year course they have made excellent men out 
of themselves. This argument even holds good further back¬ 
ward, and we can prove that there were some very good men 
practising veterinary medicine that had never seen a Veterinary 
college ; that there are still many fields for practice where “ the 
three-year graduate would not get a dividend upon the expense 
of his education, but which may be found practicable for the 
man who has only given two years’ time and the fees of two 
courses of lectures for his professional education,” I do not be¬ 
lieve. Certainly I do not know of them, but I am informed 
that the country is overstocked with veterinarians and that they 
leave the profession by the hundreds. 
There is no longer any need of manufacturing cheap veteri¬ 
narians ; neither is there further need of imparting such knowl¬ 
edge as a two-year school can furnish. All they can do is to 
give knowledge of the lowest kind, which consists of isolated 
facts, jammed into the students,—facts which may perhaps be 
retained by simple memory, but which can neither be compre¬ 
hended nor interpreted by the student with a poor education. 
All this is merely empirical knowledge, and the men who apply 
such knowledge in practice can at best do it mechanically. 
