to alarm even Mr. Greg, will assist in throwing light on a subject now confessedly veiled in obscurity, viz. the horse’s foot; and, in these days of reduction, reducing our bills, and checking the deterioration of horses.’
If it were only for the invitation thus given by ‘Impecuniosus,’ how could the writer, knowing what he knows by experience, refrain from standing up for the ‘rights of an animal’? And such an animal—not a wild beast, but one ‘that was created to be the friend and companion of man,’ if we are to believe ‘Lavengro;’ whilst another writer has said that ‘had not custom dignified the lion with the title of “king of beasts,” reason could nowhere confer that honour more deservedly than on the horse.’ Virgil describes him as having a hoof ‘that turns up the ground, and sounds deep with solid horn.’ To be sure Virgil had not seen or heard of horseshoes, or he would perhaps have sung of the clatter of iron. Brittle hoof will not sound deep, like solid horn, but more like a cracked saucer, or a ‘shuffy’ brick—it is flawed all over.
It is all very well for some people to say that they do let the frog and bars alone, and thus comply with everything. They do not comply with more than a fraction. The thickness of a shoe, without calks, is not less than three-eighths of an inch. Hence the frog, to be of any use at all (and it can only be of partial use in an iron-bound foot), must make an abnormal growth to this extent; and abnormal growths are always weak. That it will
