INTRODUCTORY LECTURE ON IIIPPOPATHOLOGY. 763 
tangible and immediate results, and in the present condition 
of veterinary medicine, that veterinary students will under¬ 
estimate the importance of that branch of their studies 
which is included with the “ Practice of Veterinary Medi¬ 
cine and Surgery/’ as specially pertaining to that animal 
we have generally been disposed to regard as our noblest 
specimen and as the type of the others—the horse. Rather 
am I fearful that in your eager anxieties to grasp those fruits 
which pathology offers to every earnest and persevering and 
correct cultivator, you should signally fail, through neglect¬ 
ing to employ the means hy which alone those fruits can be 
appropriated and made your own ; lest through disinclination 
to believe what others may tell you, or through a mistaken 
estimate of the importance of collateral subjects, you fail to 
master or understand the principles and facts of these latter, 
upon which pathological inquiry has ever rested, and in the 
employment and subordination of which any true advance¬ 
ment in the knowledge of the complex phenomena of disease 
is to he looked for. 
Feeling, as many of you doubtless do, that upon your 
capacity to master the subject of pathology, both in its 
theory and practical application, depends not merely the 
position which you may in after life occupy, but probably 
with many the answer to the sterner question, whether or 
not as veterinary surgeons you shall be able to earn your 
daily bread ? There is, I feel assured, little danger of your 
ignoring its study, I only fear that you may forget or ignore 
the fact that the principles and facts of pathology are only 
to be reached through the doors opened by the collateral 
subjects of anatomy and histology, physiology, chemistry, 
materia medica, &c. 
Standing as we now do, gentlemen, on the threshold of a 
collegiate and systematic course of instruction in the science 
of medicine, as applied to those animals which from a regard 
to our necessities or pleasures we have subjected to our in¬ 
fluence and control, there must, if success is to attend our 
labours, be some definite ideas, not merely of the objects or 
results sought after, but also of the means by which it is pro¬ 
posed to attain these. Aimless, misdirected or undirected 
labour, particularly intellectual labour, is likely to be both 
barren of results and excessively exhaustive to the mental 
powers, possessing none of that healthy invigorating influence 
which ever results from the consciousness of knowledge 
gained step hy step in obedience to will and as the result of a 
pre-arranged plan. 
The science of medicine—we use the term in its largest 
