CENTRAL VETERINARY MEDICAL SOCIETY. 
able spirit, firmly determined to enhance, exalt, and extend the 
science whose study and practice you have adopted as your life 
task. This determination, and the devotion with which it has 
been already carried out, is at once an evidence that there are 
motives prevailing among you which are far more sacred and en¬ 
nobling than those based upon a worldly desire to accumulate 
wealth which enriches not the mind, or those which induce a 
search after material pleasures that elude the grasp of the slaves 
who spend their lives pursuing them, or even those motives that 
cause many men to indulge in the jealousies, contentions, and 
narrow-mindedness of party strife. 
Societies, like yours, which have for their principal, if not their 
sole object, mutual improvement, and the perfecting of certain 
departments of knowledge, ever command the admiration and 
sympathies of good men; for human progess, and the material, 
no less than the intellectual prosperity of nations, are intimately 
dependent upon their influence and their sustained efforts. 
Therefore it is that I feel justly proud of being called a second 
time to preside over your deliberations and discussions, and to 
share in your labours, and the pleasure and profit to be derived 
from them. I shall endeavour to manifest my appreciation of the 
great honour you have done me, by carrying out the duties per¬ 
taining to the office I now hold, with all the zeal and ability of 
which I am capable. 
But, gentlemen, if I experience a large amount of gratification 
in alluding to this matter, there is another which inspires in me, 
and, doubtless, in yourselves also, a degree of gratification which 
may well cause us to exult; this is the condition in which we 
find our Society after its one year’s existence. 
When, little more than twelve months ago, you resolved upon 
its formation, grave suspicions may have been, and, no doubt, by 
some were, entertained, that it must be short-lived, even if it sur¬ 
vived the effort necessary to commence it. And the most san¬ 
guine among ourselves, though, perhaps, entertaining no fears for 
its longevity, could scarcely venture to hope for more than one 
meeting of the Eellows every three months—at least for some 
time. Yet what do we find has been the result of your energy 
and zeal? With only one exception, we have had monthly meet¬ 
ings, at which the average attendance was very large, the subjects 
brought forward being of great importance—a fact sufficiently 
evident by the attention they received; while the thoroughly 
scientific and amicable manner in which they were discussed, 
reflected the highest credit on the Eellows, and augured well for 
the success of future meetings. And as for the premature decay 
of the Society, the increase in the number of Eellows, the excel¬ 
lent basis upon which it has been founded, and the generous spirit 
