VETERINARY INSTRUCTION. 
333 
great thing to be guarded against is the squandering of resources. Many 
conceive that the end is sufficiently gained by the establishing of a 
veterinary chair in each State Agricultural College. A recent writer in 
the Philadelphia Press, after justly exposing the dangers of private vet¬ 
erinary schools, and calling attention to the need of sound veterinary 
education, concludes by asking Government “ to establish a professor¬ 
ship at West Point, and educate a class of veterinarians, one of whom 
shall be attached to each regiment of cavalry.” Why'not also endow a 
medical professorship at West Point to furnish physicians for the army? 
Surely, if the medicine and surgery of half a dozen different genera of 
animals can be taught successfully by a single professor, that of one— 
the genus homo—may be with equal success. To state the proposition 
is to show its absurdity. The veterinary student must go over similar 
ground in every respect with the medical student, but he must go over 
this in its application to solipeds, ruminants, swine, rodents, carniverous 
and land and water birds, and yet, while the medical school boasts its 
ten to twenty chairs, the veterinary must be satisfied with one solitary 
professorship, attached to an agricultural or military institution ! The 
veterinary teacher may feel complimented by this estimate of his power, 
but few would care to undertake the load of responsibility thrown upon 
him. 
If the Government can undertake the establishing of a veterinary col¬ 
lege, until a sufficiently extended curriculum to make it worthy of the name, 
it will prove an excellent investment if properly officered and furnished ; but 
no such good can ever be expected from the endowment of fifty separate pro¬ 
fessorships, each in a different institution, and each expected to turn out 
veterinarians. This would be the most efficient way to make the teaching 
superficial and imperfect, and to destroy the very possibility of obsej-vation, 
experiment and progress. Let us, if we can, have a national veterinary 
college, but do not let us squander our means on a host of isolated chairs, 
which can never fill the existing void, and the creation of which will only 
postpone indefinitely that concentrated and efficient work by which the per¬ 
manent protection of our live stock may be the better assured. 
Cornell University. James Law. 
