Page:Horse shoes and horse shoeing.djvu/517

 success was most astonishing, though no more than might, on reflection, be anticipated.

'These short shoes, thin at the heels, have caused the horses to walk on their frogs, which are their points of support, and those which were lame at the heels are sound again; those also whose inside quarters were contracted, bent over, and split (sandcrack), have been cured. It has been the same with horses whose quarters and heels have been contracted (encastelé): these have been widened, and have assumed a proper shape. The same may be said of those whose soles were convex (comblé), and which went lame with long shoes. My method has also preserved those horses which had a tendency to thrush (vulgo, "fic") and canker of the frog (crapaud).

'If the horse be shod with calkins, there is a great space between the frog and the ground; the weight of the body comes on the calkins; the frog, which is in the air, cedes to the weight; the tendon is elongated; and if the horse makes a violent and sudden movement, the rupture of that organ is almost inevitable, because the frog cannot reach the ground to support it in the very place it ought to; and if the tendon does not break, the horse is lame for a long time from the great extension of the fibres, some of which may have been ruptured. . . . . If the horse be shod without heels to his shoes (éponges), the frog, which carries all the weight of the horse's body, yields at each step, and returns again to its original form. The tendon is never in a state of distraction; its fibres are no longer susceptible of violent distension during a sudden movement. I will go so far as to assert, that rupture of the tendon will never occur on a flat pavement; if it does, it