. 350 PRESIDENT BERGh’s ADDRESS. 
It is more particularly towards that noble creature that your 
scientific and humane practice is directed; and the wisdom which 
dictates that earnest and exceptional solicitude, has a ready expla¬ 
nation in the great popular panic, which a few years ago mani¬ 
fested itself, when this country was threatened with the loss of 
the labor of that unequalled servant. 
In order to protect him from harm, and to repair injury by 
the least painful methods, you penetrate the mysterious economy 
of nature, and interrogate the sources of life and motion. 
To accomplish this laudable purpose, and prevent waste and 
agony resulting from the ignorance and insensibility of impiri- 
eism, the experienced gentleman, Dr. Liautard, to whose untiring 
perseverance this College mainly owes its existence, has placed it 
within your power, gentlemen, to obtain the necessary skill. 
Until within a very few years the members of your profes¬ 
sion were rudely denominated “ Horse Doctors.” 
The general tendency of the minds of ignorant, prejudiced, 
and vulgar persons, is to ridicule that which their biased under¬ 
standings exclude an intelligent investigation of. 
And no more potent element, for the moment, can be em¬ 
ployed, as I have learned by personal experience, than ridicule. 
But, like every other effort directed against the immutable 
laws of justice and nature, they run their ephemeral course and 
subside, with frequently no other evidence of their existence than 
the strength which their senseless opposition has imparted to 
the right. 
Perhaps, in connection with this subject, I may be pardoned 
for illustrating the truth of the observation I have just made, by 
a brief reference to the institution over which I preside : 
Born amidst the depressing influences of public apathy and 
indifference, it was destined to encounter a hostility, all the more 
pronounced by reason of its presumed infringement of the rights 
of property. 
The unreflecting and brutal world had been so long accus¬ 
tomed to beat, mutilate, and kill the animals over which they 
exercised the dominion of ownership, that any legal interference 
with that time-^honored privilege, was regarded as a most fla- 
