Page:Horse shoes and horse shoeing.djvu/624

 the vicinity of Chatham; though the soles and frogs of their hoofs were unprotected, save by the natural thickness of horn, which appears to be more abundantly secreted the more it is exposed to attrition.

When considering the best mode of protecting and preserving the foot by shoeing, we will again have occasion to refer to this system.

Since the foregoing sheets were sent to press, we learn that another 'new' method of shoeing has been 'invented,' and this time, we are told, in America—that quarter of the globe where horses were unknown until more than a quarter of a century after Fiaschi's work had been published at Spire, and where the European settlers have carried their ideas of the utility of this creature to as extreme a degree as the dwellers in the old country. This new invention, it would appear, has been for some time before the American public; though the majority of horsemen in this country were ignorant of its startling merits until the 10th of December, 1868, when a leading journal brought it into prominent notice by devoting a portion of its space to a description, that certainly reads far more like an imitation of some of the choice American advertisers than a sensible notice by a modest writer who understood his subject.

It has been our somewhat wearisome task to examine and describe several of the numerous patents sought and obtained for particular modes of shoeing, or special kinds of shoes, but which, in reality, had no right or claim to be so protected, presenting as they did no novel features, and having been in use—some of them, many centuries before.