EDITORIAL. 
399 
that of the Board of Examiners ; a third attends college one 
year, and by some unexplained method registers in the clerk’s 
office of the county of his residence on the strength of a 
“diploma ” of an alumni association, and competes for business 
with men who have fulfilled every requirement; and yet another 
individual matriculates at a veterinary school, attends a few 
lectures, and decides that college life is a waste of time, for he 
quits it, mandamuses the county clerk, who reopens registry 
books closed for years, for the reason that a physician’s cer¬ 
tificate states that when the books were open the applicant was 
prevented by sickness from being registered. This applicant 
swore that for five years prior to the closing of the books in 
the early nineties he was a practitioner of veterinary medicine, 
while a common-sense glance at the petitioner by the judge 
who gave the order would have convinced him that he must 
have made calls in the first years of his practice dressed in 
knickerbockers and a Lord Fauntleroy belt, as he is but a 
young man at the present date. The latest offense which has 
come to our knowledge is the case of a farmer who registered 
with his county clerk in 1899 and began practicing just as 
though no law of the State was being violated. 
These violations appear to be multiplying with great 
rapidity, chiefly for the reason that but few prosecutions have 
been undertaken. Thus it is that our law has become practi¬ 
cally a dead one, although it is a sovereign statute, and pun¬ 
ishment is bound to follow conviction. The law is mandatory, 
and all that is requisite to enforce its penalties is to prove the 
case before a court of competent jurisdiction. The question is, 
how can this best be accomplished? The Review believes 
that the individual members of the profession should purify 
their own districts by boldly challenging the right of any man 
to practice this profession who has failed to comply with the 
requirements of the State law governing it; and, further, it 
would appear that any veterinarian who fails to do so is aid¬ 
ing and abetting such violator and is breaking faith with the 
laws of good citizenship and the welfare of the profession of his 
