invariably failed after a short time. No general form of shoe will suit every horse—no general arrangement of the nail-holes will suffice for every foot; and these quickly and cheaply-made articles, in addition to the many defects which machine-made shoes will always have, possess one which is perhaps the most serious of all—the softness of the iron. This is so great, that the horse must either carry a most clumsy and injurious mass of material of the consistency of lead, or be shod far more frequently than the soundness of his feet will permit. Malleable cast-iron shoes, capable of sustaining a low temperature in order to alter them to suit different feet, have also been patented and tried with no better success than the machine-made shoes. Unlike them, however, they proved too hard; and if they escaped the dangers of a temperature which could scarcely be designated a red-heat, or of a few gentle taps of the hammer, and were nailed to the hoof without flying about in a number of pieces, they either smashed when brought into contact with the pavement, or proved so slippery that many horses were injured by falls with them.
Before concluding our history of the art of shoeing in England, it will, perhaps, be instructive to refer to two works, one of which has had a large sale and has passed through many editions, having been translated into one or two foreign languages; the other being the more valuable of the two, though apparently not so well known.
The first of these, by Mr Miles,[1] is what might be
- ↑ The Horse's Foot, and How to Keep it Sound. Eighth edition. London, 1856. Also, A Plain Treatise on Horse-shoeing. 3rd edition. 1860.
