Page:Horse shoes and horse shoeing.djvu/661

 to do, only contracted; the tender horn, ruthlessly exposed by the drawing-knife to rapid desiccation and other abnormal conditions, rapidly shrank, dried, and lost its healthy properties; from this arose various disorders, such as contracted heels, fissures in the horn, wasting of the frogs, and even more deep-seated maladies of the foot. Or if the unfortunate creature was put to severe exertion, the tremendous strain thrown upon the anterior and lateral parts of the foot readily set up congestion or inflammation of the vascular textures uniting the hoof to the bone within, and flat or convex soles, deformed wall, lameness, and partial or total inefficiency was the result.

This will be rendered more apparent, perhaps, if we show a section of the anterior portion of a foot pared to 'thumb-springing,' and shod with an ordinary shoe (fig. 204). This most injurious fashion of cutting away the sole and frog, and deeply notching the heels, is still largely in vogue in Britain; though in the army it has been for many years abolished, and the results of a rational method of shoeing are most marked in the diminution of foot-lameness, and the maintenance of the hoofs in a natural and serviceable condition.

So far as the integrity of the foot is concerned, there can scarcely be any doubt that the primitive farriery of the early races of Gaul and Britain was preferable to that of modern days, when this excessive mutilation of the