Page:Horse shoes and horse shoeing.djvu/73

 the Greeks scooped out resting-places or wide steps to diminish the risks attending a descent.

We will return again to the Roman authors.

L. J. M. Columella of Cadiz (A.D. 40), a writer well acquainted with the science of his day, and a scholar, gives us an admirable outline of veterinary medicine as it was then known to the Romans; and his influence on the development of this department of the healing art has been very great. In one of the twelve books of the ‘De Re Rustica,’ still in existence, he alludes to the stable management of a country villa in the following terms: ‘The master should frequently go into his stable, and should be particular in observing that the floor of the stalls is sufficiently high in the centre, and not made of soft wood, as ignorance or negligence often makes it. The floor should be made of hard oak-plank closely laid; for this kind of wood hardens the hoofs of horses and makes them like stones’

It is somewhat remarkable that, as already observed, in Java, where horses are unshod, they are kept standing on hard-wood floors without any straw or other soft substance between the boards and their hoofs; and at Singapore and Manilla—places I visited in 1860—all the