PRACTICE OF VETERINARY MEDICINE AND SURGERY. 817 
course, duration, and termination. 4th. The morbid alter¬ 
ations discoverable in the structure of [the body before, and 
particularly after, death” ( f Morbid Anatomy’). 
By a correct interpretation of these phenomena or signs a 
just appreciation of the causes operating in their production, 
assisted by our comprehending to some extent, at least, the 
nature of tissue change, we are able to forecast the probable 
course and termination of the disease, we are said to give a 
prognosis; while a true consideration of all these points 
renders us able to form an opinion as to the particular class 
or genera to which any particular disease may belong—it helps 
us with the nosology. 
For a correct and comprehensive appreciation of these 
subjects for a solution of such problems—for problems they 
often are—I would, gentlemen, on this the very threshold 
of your work and study connected with equine pathology, 
desire most particularly to impress upon you that there is 
one, and only one, way of attaining this end, viz. the correct 
cultivation of your observing faculties. 
We may, all of us, be observers; we must, all of us, be 
observers, if we are successfully to cultivate the practice of 
medicine. 
For although I can scarcely acquiesce in the opinion enter¬ 
tained by some—that to be an observer requires as great a 
range of faculties as to make a speculative thinker—that to 
note facts is as lofty a range of intellect as to conceive 
thought—still I am of opinion that in the science of medi¬ 
cine it is not easy to over-estimate the importance of correct 
observation, seeing it is by pure induction, by the observation 
of individual facts, that we rise to those general inferences 
which are the most comprehensive expressions of attainable 
truth. Facts, however, gentlemen, are of themselves of little 
worth until associated with mind; they must be registered 
and collated, and, save as indices of particular functional or 
organic changes, and the exact relation they bear to these, 
are of comparatively trifling practical value in the advance¬ 
ment of clinical or systemic medicine and surgery. 
And as in a study "like pathology, where we cannot expect 
that fixed laws or first principles exist from which we may 
reason downwards to the possession of facts, so it is that ad¬ 
vancement is less connected with the wonderful achievements 
of a few individual minds than the result of the accumulated 
labours in observation and experiment of the many; and it 
is well and encouraging that it should be so. Great and 
shining lights are only occasionally, and at intervals vouch- 
safed to humanity to guide on to dazzle by their brilliancy j 
