466 
TWENTY-SEVENTH ANNUAL MEETING 
our verdict must be candid and true. Upon no one else can reliance be placed 
for a correct, fair and honest judgment. No man must buy your opinion; no 
partiality must influence your verdict; you are nobody’s friend, but a judge 
standing impartially between two parties, one with something to sell and one 
wanting to buy something; and you are to pronounce upon the quality of an 
article of merchandize, without considering who may be benefited or who may 
be injured by your opinion. 
Yes, it is a trust of which we veterinarians ought to be proud; one of which 
we must acquit ourselves with the most delicate fidelity, with the nicest integrity 
of purpose, with the most scrupulons carefulness; one, indeed, which I believe 
places us in the first rank amongst useful citizens, by reason of the intimate con¬ 
nection which is thus established between ourselves and the courts of justice. 
It is a trust, also, which is far from being always a pleasant one to exercise, for 
it may often bring us within the scope of the threatened vengeance of violent 
and unscrupulous individuals, as well as the temptations of pecuniary offers, 
and may all too frequently place us between friends or relatives, with, we know 
not, what hazard of planting estrangement and enmity; yet with but one line of 
conduct for us to follow, in answering the single question referred to us for solu¬ 
tion, to wit: “ Is this horse sound or unsound ? ” 
The fact that this is in an important sense, an English-born nation, with a 
congenital and ineradicable spirit of traffic in our constitution, or that at least 
most of our antecedents and customs are English, accounts for the fact that many 
of our laws are either of English origin or are conformed to English precedents 
or spring from English usages, and those which regulate the trade in horses or 
relate to questions of property in the animal, are far from being exceptions to 
this rule. It is for this reason that, following English traditions, we are guided 
to a great extent in our examination and the conclusion we arrive at in horse 
trades by what we find laid down in British works on this subject, and princi¬ 
pally in those of Oliphant. 
What is soundness ? is indeed, not a question which can always be answered 
correctly off-hand. If it must mean a perfect horse—perfect in form and wholly 
free from blemish or disease—it will undoubtedly be as difficult, perhaps, as im¬ 
possible a task to find such an animal as it would be to find a literally perfect 
human being. But this cannot be the true meaning of the definition of sound¬ 
ness. The term certainly cannot mean literal peifection; but where then, it may 
be asked, can it be said that perfection ends and imperfection begins; at what 
point or line will soundness and unsoundness become merged? 
The definition of J. Stewart, who says: “that a horse is sound when he has 
no disease about him, nor any effect of disease that renders, or is likely at any 
future period to render him less useful than he would be without it,” can scarcely 
be admitted because it approaches too nearly the idea of literal perfection, espec¬ 
ially when the author goes on and states further that “a horse may have disease 
about him and be sound; he may at least have the effects of disease, have splints, 
bony or callous tumors, warts, specks on the eye, be blemished all over and still 
be a sound horse.” I might ask what we would think here of a veterinarian cer~ 
tifying as sound an animal whose metacarpal regions were covered with splints, 
whose coronets were enlarged with large ringbones, whose eyes contained speck 
