35 
THE VETERINARIAN, JANUARY 1, 1864. 
Ne quid falsi dicere audeat, ne quid veri non audeat.— Cicero. 
ANNUAL ADDRESS OE THE EDITORS. 
“We sleep and wake and sleep, but all things move; 
The sun flies forward to his brother sun; 
The dark earth follows wheeled in her ellipse ; 
And human things returning on themselves 
Move onward, leading up the golden year.” 
The rapid flight of time is a subject that has been 
descanted on by the poet, the moralist; and the philosopher; 
and that so frequently, and to such an extent, as to leave 
scarcely a trope or figure unemployed to symbolise it. Yet 
this does not lessen its importance. The following thoughts 
on it by Foster, the Essayist, will he read with interest, and 
it may he with profit. 
“ A transient meteor/* he observes, 6i has often started sud¬ 
denly on our sight as if from nothing, and shot across a tract 
of the sky, leaving a momentary trace of light, glancing past 
star after star, expending its fleeting lustre, its first brilliancy 
and its last, moving but to expire, and vanishing out of ex¬ 
istence, while the eye is eagerly pursuing its flight, and vainly 
trying to seize the appearance at any fixed point. It might 
occur to a thoughtful mind that such, in many respects, is 
our time. It can never strike our attention but as in the act 
of passing. It is incessantly darting into annihilation with a 
haste more urgent than even the eagerest wishes of an atheist. 
It elapses with such inexpressible celerity that no human, 
and perhaps no angelic mind, has quickness of thought 
enough to fix on a moment as present. Before the act of 
thought is perfected the moment is fled, and a long train of 
additional ones while the thought glances after it, and 
thousands more while the mind is 'wondering at the speed, 
and millions more while we are pensively considering that 
not one of them can ever return. And thus considerable 
periods soon vanish into the eternal night of the pastr” 
