Page:Horse shoes and horse shoeing.djvu/207

Rh débris of shoes on the continuation of this road near the mill of the Roches de Courrendelin, and also near Grellingen, always beside deep ruts, and sometimes beside transverse grooves and cuttings in the rock, in the bed of these passages, intended to prevent the horses slipping. These same shoes are also found at the bottom of the tourbières of the Swiss plain, in the Gaulish monuments of Alesia, in the plains of Champagne, on the battle-field where Attila is said to have been defeated in 451. The Cossacks, the descendants of the ancient Scythians, or Huns, yet shoe their horses in the same fashion. We might cite many other discoveries of these same shoes, as well in Switzerland as elsewhere, and particularly in the districts of the Jura. We think that these are assuredly the shoes of the indigenous horses which wandered or pastured on the mountains of our country, long before the arrival of the Romans; and they have remained in use with the Jurassic people during the Roman domination, and still later, concurrently with those we are about to describe. It may have happened that the shoeing of the Gallic horses was derived from the relations of the Gauls with Asia, where nail-shoeing is said to have been of high antiquity; and if we, as well as our neighbours, regard these small shoes as of Hunnic, Saracenic, or even of Swedish origin, it is simply because people confound the epochs of the invasions which have desolated the country. Even now, these articles are attributed to the Cossacks in 1814. 'In the numerous Roman camps whose remains occupy