Page:Horse shoes and horse shoeing.djvu/556

 One of his pupils, Bracy Clark, to some extent adopted his views, though in other respects he far outstripped him in exaggerating certain functions of the foot, and devising means to aid those functions. Without the slightest compunction, apparently, he claims the merit of having discovered the elastic properties of the foot, and re-discovers various parts. His weakness, or rather his mania, with regard to the horse's foot was lateral expansion, and descent of the sole in progression. This exaggerated idea so influenced his notions of shoeing, that he spent several years endeavouring to prove that shoes were unnecessary, and when at last forced to employ this defence, he invented several to be attached to the hoof without nails. The unyielding iron rim riveted to the lower margin of the foot by rigid nails was to him the only source of disease; the shoe in common use, the unskilful nailing, the destructive paring, were but little to blame; the prevention of that heel movement which resembled the waving of an osier branch in the wind when a horse galloped, and which contributed so much to the rapidity of movement, was the sole cause. The nailless shoe, however, was too complicated, and to remain secure on the hoof had to be as immovably fixed as the nailed one; so a jointed shoe was invented, identical in every respect with that of Cæsar Fiaschi, and so often spoken of by writers subsequent to that maréchal. This shoe was useless, and could no more facilitate the lateral expansion and contraction, even had it existed to the degree Bracy Clark imagined, than the ordinary one. With the joint