cause but the right one, and, indeed, resign themselves complacently to the presence of many diseases confessedly caused by their treatment.” “Free Lance” has seen, and others also have doubtless seen, light horses, of high breed and value, shod or burdened with 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. He may well call attention to the immense amount of laceration and compression which the delicate hollow fibers of the crust must have suffered when thus wedged up within a fourth of their natural dimensions. Besides this, he adds, the hoof was, in one instance, 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 veterinary surgeon. But, perhaps, he was shoeing to order.”
Among the reformers of these great abuses M. Charlier occupies a prominent place. His shoe in its first shape was not successful. Starting rightly on the assumption that Nature intended the horse to walk barefoot, and that the bottom of his foot was in every way fitted to stand all wear and tear, he excepted from these self-sufficing parts the outer rim, that is, the wall or crust. “He, therefore,” “Free Lance” tells us, “made a shoe of very narrow iron, less than the width of the wall, which he let in, or imbedded, to the crust, without touching the sole even on the edge; so that, in fact, the horse stood no higher after he was shod than he stood when barefooted. He urged that such a narrow piece of iron would not interfere with the natural expansion and contraction of the foot; and in this he at once went wrong, for malleable iron has no spring in it. Then, in spite of his theory, as he expressed it, he carried his shoe right round the foot into the bars, beyond where the crust ceases to be independent of them. He then got a very narrow, weak shoe, about a foot in circumference (if circumference can be applied to that which is not a complete circle); and, as he ought to have foreseen, the shoe then twisted or broke on violent exertion.” Still, as freeing the horse from a large amount of the weight usually attached to his foot, the change was an important benefit; and the lesson thus taught was not thrown away. The shoe was reduced by a man at Melton from the full to the threequarter size, and in this form it weighs five ounces. Seeley’s patent horseshoe, adopted by the North Metropolitan Tramways Company, weighs one pound and a quarter, this being a reduction of one half on the weight of the ordinary shoe; and we have to remember that each additional ounce on the horse’s foot makes a most sensible difference in the amount of work performed by him during the day. Shoeing their
