Page:Horse shoes and horse shoeing.djvu/394

366 one of their writers makes the faintest allusion to its erection.

As already observed, the climate of the North, where hoofs are soft, roads rugged, and moisture prevails, may have had much to do with the invention of shoeing among the Celts, and compelled the Romans to resort to it when they left their sunny southern climate, where hoofs are hard, and their wonderful paved strata.

If the relics found in the battle-field of Alesia belong to the final struggle between Julius Cæsar and the Gauls, then the Romans must have been cognizant of this means of defending horses' feet at a comparatively early period. Beger has figured a curious bronze medal (fig. 141), which he classes among those of Julius Cæsar, though he heads them 'Numismata Incerta;' and this uncertainty deprives it of much of the great interest it might possess with regard to the subject of our treatise. On the obverse of this medal appear two snakes with their tails entwined, and in the middle of the circle they form are two objects resembling one of the German shoes found by Linden-