172 
J. LAW. 
one thousand per annum, but the veterinary care has reduced 
this of late years to sixty-seven per one thousand yearly. In the 
English cavalry the record is far better, and largely because a 
superior stable accommodation has been secured. Colonel Sir F. 
Fitzwygram, himself a veterinarian, in a recent lecture, gave it as 
the result of his experience, that veterinary sanitary science had 
reduced the loss of horses in the English cavalry regiments to a 
minimum, and the annual “casting” of horses to ten per cent; 
giving an average service of ten years to each horse carrying two 
hundred and fifty pounds on its back, at a rapid pace, over rough 
ground. The same authority recently mentioned an instance in 
which the supervision of a veterinarian led to a yearly saving of 
$30,000 in a shed of four hundred hard working horses. An 
instance almost as striking occurred in the practice of a friend of 
the present writer, in charge of the horses of a large colliery 
company in Durham, England. 
But it is in the department of sanitary or preventive medicine 
that the value of the work of the veterinarian is the highest. 
Ordinary diseases of animals carry off isolated individuals only, 
and the full measure of the loss is in every case seen and appre¬ 
ciated at once. One case of sickness or death brings no danger 
to the other stock, and the owner can, in any case, estimate 
whether he can better afford to lose his property than to incur 
expenses for medical treatment. But with animal plagues, the 
first case of illness is pregnant with a mighty and ever increas¬ 
ing danger, not only to the other stock of the same owner, but 
to all the live stock of the nation, and even in some cases to the 
citizens as well. Taught by the bitter experience of many cen¬ 
turies, the separate nations of Europe now avail of veterinary 
science to save them from yearly losses of millions of dollars by 
animal contagia. A country like England, which has been be¬ 
guiled into a false sense of security, by its comparative isolation, 
and that has failed to avail of this modern science, has been 
drained of $40,000,000 in one and a half years by one plague, 
and of a regular tax of upwards of $15,000,000 per annum by 
another. 
Coming to our own land, we find a loss by one plague of swine 
