least expected. Even the Charlier shoe, although it will not pick up snow (the facility for doing which is increased by lifting the foot higher from the ground, when cogs and calks are used), is not perfect upon glassy streets. We have seen that Mr. Bowditch condemned the use of both toe and heel calks, as a general rule; yet when he rode his mare upon a frozen lake he turned down ‘a small toecalk.’ He had no calk behind because the heels were bare, and so there was no danger of slipping on their part; neither would there be any reason to fear that the bare toe would act otherwise.
The writer has seen a valuable light horse, nearly thoroughbred, have on a full set of shoes, in which eight nails, nearly three-sixteenths of an inch in thickness, were driven four in each quarter, and in a space of three inches for each four nails. What an immense amount of laceration and compression the delicate hollow fibres of the crust must have suffered by thus wedging them up within a fourth of their natural dimensions! Besides this, the hoof was carved out on the crust to receive three clips, one on the toe and one on each quarter. A calk, three-quarters of an inch high, was put on one heel of each hind shoe, and, on the other heel, a screw cog of equal height. On each front shoe a cog, also three-quarters of an inch high, was put upon each heel. This wretched victim to fashion was then regarded with the utmost satisfaction by the farriers and his groom; and all this heathenism was perpetrated in the forge of a
