have not had a horse lame since, except when pricked by the artist; and it is a matter of the greatest astonishment to me, how any other form of a shoe could evep come into generaluse . . . . This flat shoe is not to be made with a smooth surface, after the French manner, but channelled round, or what is called fullered, after the English manner;[1] by which the horse is better prevented from sliding about, and the heads of the nails are less liable to be broken off; both which inconveniences attend the shoe whose surface is smooth.'
The best mode of preventing horses from 'cutting' is next dealt with; and in treating of the value of turning horses out to grass without shoes, we learn that Osmer was perfectly cognizant of the expansive properties of the horse's foot, about which so much discussion and discovery has been made in this century, though his views are rational and perfectly correct; which is more than can be said for those of the majority of succeeding theorists. He admits the value of Lafosse's 'lunette' or 'crescent' shoes, in certain cases, chiefly in those where the hoofs are contracted: 'In such a shoe the heel of the horse rests in some measure upon the ground, receives some share of weight, and is, by means of such weight and pressure, kept open and expanded; by which expansion of the heels the compression on the interior parts of narrow-footed horses is removed, and he that was before lame is, by degrees, as the foot spreads, rendered sound—if there be no disease in the interior parts of the foot. Again, where horses have
- ↑ Osmer is the first writer I can discover in England who speaks of this 'fullering' as English. The reader will remember it as Burgundian, or rather German, and prevalent in the fifth century.
