differently broken in, unshod and had never been stall-fed.’[1]
Dr Browne reports of the horses in Jamaica: ‘They are generally small, but very sure-footed and hardy, which renders them extremely fit for those mountainous lands; and their hoofs are so hard that they seldom require shoes; but this is the effect of the heat of the country and dryness of the land.’[2]
Iron shoes are not used for horses in Japan, and Head, in his ride across the Pampas of South America, tells us that shoes are utterly unknown to all the South American country horses. ‘But even when unshod, the wear of their boundless plains, on which scarcely a stone is seen, is so insignificant, that to keep the hoofs of a proper length, they have even to be shortened by the hammer and chisel.’[3] Another traveller in that region asserts that the mule of the Peruvian Sierras, with its massy and wellrounded hoof, needs no shoes on hard or soft ground, in summer or in winter.
Clark says of the north of Sweden: ‘Neither the men nor their horses are shod, but go bare-footed. In some parts of Sweden, as at Naples, the hinder feet only of the horses are left unshodden; but here horses of a beautiful breed were put to our waggon, without a shoe to any of their feet, as wild and fleet as Barbs;’ and again, when entering Finland from Sweden, he writes: ‘The horses are, as usual, small, but beautifully formed, and very fleet. The peasants take them from the forests when they are
