Page:Horse shoes and horse shoeing.djvu/203

Rh smelting is still in use among some peoples unacquainted with the improvements of civilized nations. The ancient Peruvians, for example, built their furnaces in this manner. Mungo Park also noticed a similar practice in Africa, and it has also been described as existing in the Himalaya mountains of Central Asia.

'The shoes of the first period are small, narrow, and scant of metal, constantly pierced with six holes, whose external opening is strongly stamped in a longitudinal form, to lodge the base of the nail-head. The slight thickness, and especially the narrowness of the metal, causes it at each hole to bulge, and to give a festooned appearance to the external border of the shoe. The thickness of the latter is from one-eighth to one-seventh of an inch, and the width from six to seven-tenths of an inch between each hole, thus indicating the dimensions of the bar of metal before stamping. The form of the stamped holes indicates the employment of a steel punch, and consequently a knowledge of the manufacture of steel at the period when these horse-shoes were made. 'One of these shoes (fig. 29) has been found, with a portion of the bones of a horse, in a peat-moss near the old abbey of Bellelay, at a depth of twelve feet, resting on the primitive soil. There was, therefore, every reason to believe that this horse had not been buried in the peat, but that, on the contrary, it had perished in this place before the formation of the heap, inasmuch as its scattered bones testified to the work of carnivorous animals gathered around their prey. Many of these shoes have been found at various depths in the turf-beds of the Helvetic plain, but we have not been able to obtain