to fall into the habit of docking those of both parents, we should soon get a breed of horses with a diminished number of vertebrae. If the minus reappears in the offspring, it is presumable that the plus will reappear likewise. The plus is often to be ascribed to shoeing.
Where our horses most fail is in their feet and legs. It was lately stated at a meeting in England that French statistics have shown that in their army two-fifths of all cast horses were so cast for ‘worn out feet and legs.’ Let us take a common-sense (which will turn out to be the most scientific) care of our horses’ feet by the use of the brake on wheels, and not a clumsy substitution in the shape of a calked shoe on the horse’s foot. The frog is a natural calk, but it must have fair play. It is pointed in front like a ploughshare to offer resistance in one direction. To offer resistance in the contrary direction it is semi-cloven, and thus it offers a double resistance, for the very evident reason that a horse needs more aid to go ahead than he does to stop himself. Yet the two ends have been rightly balanced by Nature, if we could only see the thing as such.
We have the authority of previous writers that the shoeing question is a national one, and that much economy is in store for the nation if any improvement can be introduced. The real fact is that millions annually hang upon this very hinge, because we are obliged, through the short lives of our horses, to import weekly a large number of hideous foreign-bred brutes, many of which are mares, which, when
