Page:Horse shoes and horse shoeing.djvu/425

 Rusius, Ruzo, de Ruccis, Rusé, Rugino, Rosso, and Riso—for by all of these names is he designated in the many editions of his writings), a veterinary surgeon of Rome (as he styles himself), and a friend of Cardinal Napoleon de Ursinis, who lived in the 13th and 14th centuries. His observations on the maladies of the lower animals, though similar to those of Ruffus, are, for the time in which they were written, remarkably exact, and on shoeing, though brief, they are yet reasonable. 'It is necessary to shoe horses with good and proper shoes, shaped like the hoofs; the more the extremities of the shoe—the heels, are narrow and light, the more easily will the horse lift his feet; and the narrower the shoe is, so much more will the horn grow. It is also advantageous to know, that the oftener we shoe a young horse, so rapidly does the horn become thin and weak; and, on the contrary, to accustom it to travel without shoes while it is young, is to make the hoofs larger and stronger.' In other chapters, the diseases of the foot, many of them arising from shoeing, are carefully described.

In the 11th century, I think we have the first written intimation that oxen were shod for travelling. Guibert de Nogent, a contemporary of Peter the Hermit, and who has so well and so eloquently described the almost morbid excitement attending the preaching of that worthy in favour of the Crusades and the rescue of Jerusalem, gives as an illustration, that of 'the rustic, who shod his oxen like horses, and placed his whole family on a cart; where it was amusing to hear the children, on the