ADDRESS DELIVERED AT COMMENCEMENT EXERCISES. 
5 
point in your lives. Hitherto you have worked entirely under 
the direction of others, you have been engaged in laying broad 
and sound foundations on a solid base, you have been forging 
and furbishing the weapons which you are to wield in the war¬ 
fare of life. How your work must be spontaneous and indepen¬ 
dent, your solid superstructure must be built up, your battle with 
disease and death must be a daily and earnest conflict. How will 
tell the sound training through which you have passed. How 
you can appreciate, not simply a cluster of outward symptoms as 
would the simple empiric, but, tracing effect to cause, you can 
see in the abnormality of the eye indications of particular cere¬ 
bral lesions; in certain nervous disorders, results of digestive, 
urinary, hepatic, or ellimiatory troubles; in certain skin erup¬ 
tions, evidence of dyspepsia, hepatic torpor, lack of trauma- 
tosis, or of kidney excretion. From different altered conditions 
of the urine you can correctly infer disease of the kidneys, of the 
liver, of the lungs, of the brain, or of the loins. I might add 
indefinitely to this list, but these will suffice to point my state¬ 
ment that in the region of therapeutics “ knowledge is power,” 
and that that man whose practice has the most solid basis of 
science , or, in other words, of knoivledge , is the man whose labors 
will be crowned with the most abundant success. It will take 
time to root out the ignorant empiric, but if you are true to your 
scientific foundations, and daily add a few more blocks to the 
imperishable structure, you will raise a name which all men will 
see and approve; you will be an honor to yourselves, to your 
Alma Mater, and to the country of your choice. 
At the present moment our common profession is perhaps 
more highly appreciated in America than it has been at any time 
in the past. Men begin to recognize that the veterinarian is not 
a mere dispenser and administrator of drugs, nor a simple wielder 
of the surgeon’s knife, but that lie is in the highest sense a sani¬ 
tarian. Here, gentlemen, we have already accomplished much. 
AVe can point with pride to the hundreds of millions that have 
been saved to each of the countries of AVestern Europe by the 
control and extinction of animal pestilences. Even America can 
testify of this work, and Massachusetts and Connecticut are 
