Page:Horse shoes and horse shoeing.djvu/77

 only, so that it might be soft for the horses when resting, and hard for their hoofs when standing.

Publius Vegetius Renatus (A.D. 450—510?), a veterinarian, has left us the most complete treatise on veterinary medicine of any ancient writer. He describes more fully than any other Roman hippiatrist the maladies and accidents to which horses where liable in his day; and though he speaks of contracted tendons, horses and mules walking on the fronts of their hoofs, and the casualties these animals are exposed to, as well as the method of curing them, yet he says nothing of shoeing (in a modern sense), either as producing disease or injuries, or as a means of remedying these.

When treating of the hoofs and the feet generally, however, it is plainly intimated that such a practice as nailing on iron plates was not available in his age. He