250 LANCASHIRE VETERINARY MEDICAL ASSOCIATION. 
by the horns,” in this very room to night. I honour the man for his 
great courage and daring, and that he is able to grapple with so great a 
difficulty as pleuro-pneumonia in cattle. My prayer is, that his sagacity 
and penetrating intellect may lead him to touch the secret spring, and 
unseal the fountain from whence will flow out the true means of cure, 
and enable him and us to vanquish this terrible scourge; or, if failing in 
being actually successful, he will be able to strip it of all its mysteries 
and insidious character, placing its hideous proportions nakedly before 
us, and bringing to bear upon it the full blaze of science, which will in 
the end result in the adoption of a certain method of cure. You may 
rely upon it as a certain truth, that an arm which is ever willing and all 
powerful will be stretched out to help us. We must never forget that 
God only helps those who help themselves. I should wish this asso¬ 
ciation of ours to make some great effort, and to accomplish something 
worthy of the city in which we live. The usefulness and dignity of our 
association depend entirely upon its own members. We have within 
ourselves the germs of all-conquering power. Honour, like virtue, is an 
attribute that cannot be laid upon a man or upon a society, and be 
removed like unto a garment; it must proceed from within the man. 
It is a product of a high and noble nature. Scientific knowledge, com¬ 
bined with close observation, becomes a light to our path, and opens our 
eyes to a world which the charlatan never enters. He may practice the 
veterinary art, but veterinary science never. Nor would he if he con¬ 
tinued in practice for a thousand years. It is said that practical wisdom 
depends entirely upon chance, and is the only thing that can neither be 
taught nor learned; that it is a sagacity, which would seem infallible, an 
instinct for truth which cannot err. But I have yet to learn, and would 
put the question boldly : Why cannot a philosopher or a discoverer 
develope himself now as in times that are past. I believe it is, in some 
measure at least, referable to a most erroneous and wide-spread notion, 
that philosophers and discoverers are prodigies, men of gigantic intellects, 
and that they accomplish their purpose, or make a discovery, by a 
simple instinctive effort of their mind; than which nothing can be more 
erroneous. They are all of them men like unto ourselves, differing only 
in their ardour. And it is by their untiring intensity of application that 
the truths of science are developed and promulgated. It is not because 
we have no men in the present age possessing the quantity or quality of 
intellect to make great men. • An example of success occurs to my mind 
at this moment. A poor lad, seven years of age, is seen with axe in 
hand, working in the western forest, clearing the ground in the back 
woods of America. Until seventeen he was nothing but a simple farm 
labourer, with probably not more than one year’s schooling in his whole 
life. This lad was frequently seen pondering over and studying by the 
light of the evening fire books which he had borrowed, he being too poor 
to buy them. This man, out of his own intellectual resources, his indo¬ 
mitable energy and skill, unlike a “ Napoleon,” with a prestige and a 
name, gradually acquires a name in his own country, which becomes a 
name above every name. The greatest and most powerful nation upon 
the earth elected Abraham Lincoln their president, by a larger number 
of votes than were ever recorded for any other man before. Thus it 
would seem his own great natural talents, unswerving honesty and 
indomitable industry, caused his fellow men to select him to conduct the 
passage of a great people through a crisis involving the destinies of the 
whole world. No, there is no lack of material to make discoveries, and 
no lack of problems wanting solving. It is because there is too much 
apathy in man; the desire to become great is not sufficiently strong to 
