764 INTRODUCTORY LECTURE ON HIPPOPATHOLOGY. 
and widest sense, including both the arbitrary divisions of 
medicine and surgery so called—whether human or vete¬ 
rinary, may be looked upon in two aspects, it maybe viewed 
as a science , and as an art. 
As a science it proposes to take into consideration all that 
is connected with disease in its causes, origin, development, 
progress and results. As an art it is concerned with the 
practical application of these great truths—general principles 
so called—which have been arrived at by carefully recorded 
observation and experiment in all pertaining to the guidance 
of the animal system through these altered conditions re¬ 
cognised as disease and the proper manipulatory practice 
indicated where this is required. 
For us, as you are aware, it is medicine veterinary, and this 
more particularly in the latter aspect, which shall regularly 
and from time to time demand our undivided attention. 
Veterinary surgeons on entering on their active professional 
career, are not so far, if at all, behind their brother practi¬ 
tioners of human medicine in their knowledge of what per¬ 
tains more properly to some of the divisions of scientific 
medicine, such, for instance, as special anatomy and 
chemistry. 
It is rather, or precisely, in that field 'where of all others 
so many think themselves most competent, that we are most 
deficient, and consequently sustain the greatest loss. I 
mean pathology. We have too much dwelt in the region of 
speculation. The inheritances of the past we have too often 
accepted as substantial acquisitions when they have been 
merely hypotheses ; accepting them as demonstrated truths, 
we have, as in the science of pure numbers, reasoned from 
these downwards to facts, which we have ruthlessly squeezed 
in our anxiety that they should fit our assumed hypothesis. 
Cherishing what we fancied, or seemed to fancy, as patho¬ 
logical axioms, we have therefrom attempted to develop an 
accurate description of particular diseases. Emerging so re¬ 
cently from rough and vulgar empiricism, and at a period 
when human medicine was being regarded as a deductive 
science, we could scarcely expect aught else than that 
seizing hold of the more scientific part of our profession as 
that which raises it above all more scientific pursuits, and 
eschewing the plainer but more certain and correct pathway 
to medical truth, our earlier cultivators of veterinary medi¬ 
cine should, like their compeers in human medicine, become 
enamoured of what they consider in pathology first principles 
or fixed laws, from which might be evolved or deduced a 
definite system of clinical medicine; while if observation and 
