FARRIER
—is the appellation by which a person is known, whose occupation it has hitherto been considered to execute the joint office of furnishing shoes for the PROTECTION of the FEET, and the BODY with MEDICINE for the cure of disease. It has been, from its original formation as a business, the most dangerous, laborious, and least compensated, trade (or profession) of any in the kingdom; consequently none but the most indigent or illiterate (from the eaves of a cottage, or the walls of a workhouse) could be prevailed upon to undertake it. In proof of which, it is a well known fact, that, for a century past, not more than one in TWENTY of its practitioners, in either town or country, has ever been enabled to leave a clear twenty pounds to his family at the time of their decease. Recent circumstances have, however, occurred, to give the PRACTICE of FARRIERY a new complexion; but, unluckily, in the extreme; for the appearance of "The Gentleman's Stable Directory" a few years since, and the success of its author in his indefatigable endeavours, and energetic exertions, to promote a reformation in the shamefully neglected, erroneous, and cruel system of FARRIERY, constituted such a blaze of national emulation, that the institution, erection, and establishment, of a PUBLIC SCHOOL, has rendered practitioners in FARRIERY (newly ycleped "Veterinary Surgeons") as numerous as the necessitous medical adventurers in almost every town and village of the kingdom. See Veterinary College.