GLASGOW VETERINARY COLLEGE. 
875 
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.Europe, all having for their object to rescue the veterinary art from 
obscurity, and bring it into the form of a science. Several of these 
writers, such as Gibson, Bracken, La Fosse, and Osmer, were medical 
men of eminence. They did much to free the veterinary art from blind 
empiricism. Yet their practice and prescriptions, though vast improve¬ 
ments on those of their day, are tinged with cruelties and puerilities at 
which an ordinary strapper would now stand amazed. At this we need 
not be astonished. Those were the days when medicine and surgery, 
even as applied to the human patient, were of such a kind that we do 
not marvel that so few were cured, but that any one escaped alive from 
the hands of the learned faculty. At length, as ordinary medicine began 
to improve, veterinary science followed in its wake. In Italy some 
veterinary colleges, of which little is known, were in existence in the 
beginning of last century. But it was not till 1761 that the first vete¬ 
rinary college was founded in France, at Lyons, under the well-known 
Bourgelat. This was followed by the now celebrated school of Alfort, 
founded in 1766. In 1792 the Veterinary College of London was 
founded, Charles Vial de Sainbel and Delabere Blaine being the first 
professors; and the work of the latter, which has passed through 
numerous editions, is still highly prized. Since then veterinary col¬ 
leges have been formed in every European capital and in many of the 
principal cities. In Scotland, Professor Dick founded a Veterinary 
School at Edinburgh, and in Glasgow our worthy Principal has suc¬ 
ceeded in establishing this College, which has already become an honour 
to the kingdom, and for which a great future is, I doubt not, reserved. 
(Loud applause). Veterinary medicine has now reached a position to 
which even in the most brilliant days of Greece and Borne it certainly 
never attained. It is no longer a mere art; it has become a science, and 
a science of vast range and vast importance. It has passed out of the 
stage of empiricism. Its professors are no longer content to do or pre¬ 
scribe what they have seen done or prescribed before. They wish to 
know the reasons of the practice they adopt; they wish to interrogate 
nature by experiment and observation; they seek to collect and arrange 
facts over the widest areas and by every variety of means, and they 
labour to evolve from the materials so collected the concealed laws or 
tenors of action by which nature may be supposed to work. They do 
not reject theory, but they insist on bringing the most plausible theories 
to the test of experiment. Unlike their predecessors, they do not 
compel fact to square with a favourite theory ; they regard theory as 
valuable only when it harmonizes with and serves to explain fact. There 
is in the present day a circumstance that at once extends the bounds of 
veterinary science, and gives it an importance never felt before. You 
are all aware of the modern theory of evolution, based on what is termed 
natural selection or survival of the fittest in the continued struggle for 
existence. Its most ardent and advanced votaries claim for this theory 
the real explanation—not of the origin of creation, as some have sup¬ 
posed —put of the origin of species; in other words, the real cause of 
the various types of life heretofore and now existing on the earth. I 
cannot say that I am a convert to this notion. I do not think that the 
ascertained facts are a sufficient basis to support the vast theory which 
is attempted to be reared on them. But whether I am right or not in 
this view, one thing, I think, has been clearly established, and that is, 
that among all the° vertebrates—man included—the materials, organs, 
and structure of the body are so connected in accordance with some 
underlying plan or law, that all are in strict analogy, and are only 
adaptations of one common set to the wants and requirements of each 
