EDITORIAL. 
481 
or from the tissues which formed the seat of the symptomatic 
lesions of the disease, and also from many other sources of dif¬ 
fusion. How wide the divergence between Dr. Gadsden’s views 
and these! 
American Veterinary Review Prize. —We suppose that our 
readers, as well as all other members of the veterinary profession in 
the United States, are aware of our offer, published in our Decem¬ 
ber issue, of a special prize for the best original paper furnished 
in competition, for publication in the Review, the premium to be 
awarded upon the verdict of a committee of five veterinarian 
practitioners, to be selected from the ranks of the profession in 
the United States at large. 
In the simplicity of our enthusiasm we were led to believe 
that our object would be so immediately appreciated, and we 
should so promptly awaken the generous sympathies of our breth¬ 
ren, that the process of obtaining the necessary jury, as in some 
of our current exciting criminal trials, would be one of rejection 
rather than of selection, and might involve the danger of seeming 
to slight a few of our good friends by making some more or less 
invidious distinctions in excluding them from the committee; and 
so we have trembled, somewhat, over our apprehended embarrass¬ 
ment fjtu choix , as we have thought the thing over. We wanted 
barely five men, out of all the veterinarians in the country (leav¬ 
ing out, of course, the crowd of intending contestants, whose 
number we refrain from attempting to estimate), barely jive men , 
willing and consenting to respond to our appeal for co-operation 
and help by contributing the weight of their reputation and influ¬ 
ence in behalf of a measure which could not well fail to benefit 
the profession of their choice, with but a trifling expenditure of 
time and thought. And so we opened a correspondence with 
certain of our colleagues, with an expectation of being soon able 
to announce the composition of our committee of selection. Then 
we began to discover the extent to which we had erred in failing 
to count on the wonderful facility with which, under the most 
plausible of pleas, such a request could be declined and evaded. 
In some cases the declinations were conveyed in terms so nicely 
chosen that it was almost a pleasure to be disappointed and 
