THE VETERINARIAN AS A NATURALIST. 
327 
the impossibility of pursuing - any special line of study, must be 
apparent. It was just such difficulty that seemed to confront 
me in preparing a paper suitable to be read on such an occasion 
as this, but there was one thought from which I seemed to ob¬ 
tain a modicum of consolation : There used to be a saying 
among whist players, to the effect, that “ whenever uncertain 
what to play, always play trumps.” Being an ardent devotee of 
my branch of the healing art, I made the application in this 
way. If you are undecided as to the choice of a subject, do not 
lose the opportunity, but say something in behalf of your pro¬ 
fession ; there are, perhaps, more nature studies embraced by it 
than by almost any other, and this fact is, as yet, not fully ap¬ 
preciated in our Southern country. Such, then, was a part of 
the line of argument I advanced to myself, and by which I was 
led to select as the topic of my paper, the Veterinarian as a 
Naturalist, which I hope may be at least interesting, if -not in¬ 
structive. We are told by Hoblyn, in his dictionary of terms 
used in medicine and the collateral sciences, that a naturalist 
was formerly a denier of revealed truth, of any but natural re¬ 
ligion, but now, an investigator, and often a devout one, of 
Nature and her laws. Placing the construction on the term, as 
does Hoblyn, the veterinarian ought really to take high rank as 
a naturalist, and in what follows, I shall endeavor, in as modest 
a way as possible, to give some of the reasons why. 
As all of you are aware, anatomy is the foundation study of 
all medical work, but, first of all, it may be interesting to note 
the various animals which come more especially within the 
scope of the study of the veterinarian. Of course the common 
domesticated animals all belong to the vertebrate sub-kingdom, 
and the two classes with which he has chiefly to deal are the 
aves and the mammalia. As to the orders of the former—the 
ratitoe and the carinatse—his attention and study are directed to 
each. While the orders of the class, mammalia, which claim 
his attention, are (i) The ungulata, with its sub-orders—the 
perisso-dactyla and the artiodactyla. Included in the first of 
these being the horse, ass, mule, zebra, quagga, etc., and in the 
