It is to the Museum that the students repair two or three times a week, and gain a practical knowledge of the ailments which are associated with animals.
The glass cases contain horses' mouths, showing the various stages of the teeth. Innumerable are the bottles holding preserved portions of each and every animal. In one of the cases is a very interesting specimen of the students' work. It illustrates the anatomy of a dog's leg. The bone is taken in hand by the student, and by an ingenious arrangement of red sealing wax the blood-vessels are faithfully and realistically introduced.
Every case contains a curiosity—one is full of the feet of horses, and its next-door neighbour protects a wonderful array of horseshoes. The ideal horse-shoe is one which requires no nails. The nearest approach to this is a shoe which clamps the hoof, is screwed up tightly, and the whole thing kept in place by an iron band. The great amount of pressure which is required to keep the shoe from shifting, and the possible injury it may cause the wearer, has prevented its universal use.
Here is an old-fashioned drenching bit—the old idea of administering medicine to horses. The bit is hollow and a funnel is attached to it, to be inserted in the animal's mouth and the mixture poured in. To-day, however, a tin drenching can of a somewhat pyramidical shape is simply used.
At the door one may brush against what appears to be a mop of extra size. It is—to use a homely expression—a calf's leg with "a housemaid's knee." This curious growth is five feet in circumference and a foot and a half in depth. But perhaps the most remarkable corner is that devoted to the storing of massive stones and cement, hardened together, which have been taken from the bodies of various animals.
These are of all shapes and sizes. Two of them taken from a mare, weigh fifty-four pounds, and many of them would turn the scale at thirty-five to forty pounds. The formation of such stones is curious. Above is a drawing—in miniature—of a huge stone formed inside a cow. The cow—by no means a careful one—enjoyed the green grass of the meadow in blissful ignorance that even tin-tacks and nails get lodged on the sward occasionally. The cow, in her innocence, swallowed the nail—there it is, imbedded in the centre. Lime and earth deposited and hardened round it, with the result that an immense stone was formed of nearly forty pounds in weight.
Next comes the instrument-room. This is an apartment not calculated to act as a sedative upon the visitor who is forced to be a frequent caller on the dentist. The forceps for drawing horses' teeth are more than a yard long, and it requires a man of might and muscle to use them with effect. The tracheotomy tubes—inserted when a horse has difficulty in breathing—stand out brightly from amongst the dull and heavy appearance of the firing irons, which are employed in lameness, as a blister on the limb. It is interesting to be told that there are a number of horses in the hunting field, in the streets, and the park, wearing silver tracheotomy tubes, as an assistance to their breathing, and, to put it in the words of a doctor, "doing well."
The pharmacy is by no means to be hurriedly passed by. It is the chemist's shop of the establishment, the place where students enter to be initiated into all the mysteries of compounding a prescription. They may crush the crystals into powder in a mortar of diminutive size, or pound them in one as big as a copper with a pestle as long as a barber's pole. A great slate is covered with veterinary hieroglyphics; the shelves are decorated with hundreds of blue bottles, the drawers brimming over with tiny phials and enormous gallipots. Step behind a substantial wooden screen, which practically says "Private," and you have the most approved of patterns in the way of a chemist's counter. Here is every item, down to the little brass scales and weights, the corks and sealing wax, the paper and string.