NORTH OF SCOTLAND VETERINARY MEDICAL ASSOCIATION. 221 
this association for the courtesy they had always shown him during 
his official year, and it now devolved upon the association to elect 
his successor. 
Mr. Mellis, Inverurie, in rising to propose a vote of thanks to 
Mr. Dewar, said he was sure that all would agree that he had most 
faithfully discharged the duties which had devolved upon him, and 
he (Mr. Mellis) would propose that Mr. Dewar be re-elected 
President. 
Mr. Hay, of Ellon, said that it gave him very great pleasure in 
seconding Mr. Mellis’s motion, as he felt satisfied there was none in 
that hall had the good of the profession and this association more 
at heart than Mr. Dewar. 
The motion was unanimously agreed to. 
Mr. Cassie, New Machar, proposed that the whole of the office¬ 
bearers and Council should be re-elected, which was seconded by 
Mr. Masson, Kintore, and agreed to. 
After which the called on Mr. Cassie to read the follow¬ 
ing paper on “ Pleuro-pneumonia.” 
Mr. President and Gentlemen. —In selecting pleuro-pneu- 
monia for the subject of an essay to lay before you to-day I have 
not been prompted by the notion that I had anything new to say 
on the subject, or that I had been particularly successful in treating 
the complaint, or that 1 considered myself better able to deal with 
it than any of yourselves. I selected it solely because it is a 
disease of a very formidable character, one that has wrought fearful 
havoc in farmer’s herds, and one which we should all endeavour by 
any means to banish from the British nation, if not from every 
other. Veterinarians have, I think, in the past, been wasting their 
strength in trying to fight single-handed this rapacious foe, w'hicli 
every now and then appears, and with resistless fury, defies their 
strength and destroys many of their employer’s stock. When such 
has so often happened in, I presume, the experience of most mem¬ 
bers of our profession, we are bound as a class to combine our 
strength, to unite our skill, in order that, if possible, we may face 
the foe with greater success. So little have veterinary surgeons as 
yet done in preventing loss to stock-owners from pleuro, that many 
of them think we know nothing more about the disease than they do 
themselves, and so are now proposing to seek liberty from govern¬ 
ment to stamp it out,” as our Aberdeen farmers lately did the 
rinderpest. I do not intend just now to express an opinion for or 
against such a course, only I would repeat, that veterinarians ought 
to bestir themselves and unitedly renew their efforts to investigate 
the disease; they are surely as competent to say whether the poleaxe 
be its best remedy as any other class of men in the kingdom. I 
may be wrong, but I venture to say that, influential at head quar¬ 
ters though the farmers be, they will ask in vain for their famous 
killing cure if our profession do not first recommend the practice. 
There may be no “ great lights” among the members of the 
association we have formed in this northern region, still there are 
XLII. 16 
