CORRESPONDENCE. 
849 
a physician and surgeon he must study and be blest with a 
sound mind in a sound body, with an honest heart and a cool 
and clear head, for genius never stamps her image on common 
clay. I deprecate and denounce the Doctor’s effort to disparage 
the non-graduate, for a man may be vastly more learned and 
efficient without a diploma than others who have them. Does 
he not know that when the great Daniel Webster received his 
diploma he tore it in shreds and said, u Mv energy and industry 
may make a man of me, but this miserable parchment never 
shall. . Kliiiu Burritt, the learned blacksmith, acquired thirty- 
two different languages while working with his book before 
him at the forge. But, do not understand me that every black¬ 
smith has the brain of Elihu Burritt. Robert Burns and Will¬ 
iam Shakespeare have swayed the world with their sublime 
poetry for two hundred years, and Abraham Lincoln, in every 
sense the equal of Moses and Solomon, were not only non¬ 
graduates, but they never even went to school. I cite these few 
from among the millions that I might, for the purpose, if pos¬ 
sible, of shedding a ray of light into the dim and dark un¬ 
derstanding of the Doctor’s murky mind. Let it be under¬ 
stood that no one can honor an educated collegian more than I, 
but they have their peers among the great army of able men 
without diplomas. We are all students and workers alike in 
one cherished common cause, and the distinctions, such as the 
Doctor assumes, are not only injurious and odious, but can only 
emanate from a very little man with a very shallow mind. 
Thus far we have curried the Doctor and his Examining 
Board with softest silk, but we must now come to something 
more specific, and which fully sustains the worst we have said! 
In the city of Mattoon, Illinois, at the semi-annual meeting 
of the Illinois Veterinary Medical and Surgical Association, in 
the month of August, 1900, and before a well attended meeting, 
there being present visitors of eminence from the Illinois State 
Veterinary Medical Association, appeared an applicant for mem¬ 
bership in our association, who had successfully passed the 
requisite examination before this State Board of Examiners. 
He appeared before our committee, and we proceeded to give 
him the usual examination. The questions put to him in^an- 
atomy, physiology, pathology, surgery, materia medica and ob¬ 
stetrics were primary and of the simplest sort, and to our utter 
amazement the man failed to answer a single question. When 
asked to locate the inferior maxilla, he was unable to do so, nor 
could he give the number of incisor or molar teeth, nor locate 
