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 Rh remote from it as the eye; ergo, it will do the same to other organs that are nearer to the foot, or even farther from it.

Mr. Fearnley says: ‘Next to the eye the larynx is the most delicate organ of the body.’ ’Roaring’ is supposed to be due to the abuse of the bearing-rein, which, in some cases, is most likely to be true; but then we have horses, such as racers and hunters, that have never become acquainted with the bearing-rein, and yet are ‘roarers.’ ‘Whistling,’ ‘wheezing,’ thick wind and broken wind, ‘have been much thought about, and have had the fancy considerably racked to account for their existence.’ It is a singular fact, that unshod horses are very rarely indeed to be met with suffering from blindness, or any of these other infirmities. Why should they be so free from them? They work harder and fare worse than ours do. So we see that apart from the acknowledged, and most apparent, diseases caused by the falsely so-called ‘necessary evil’ of shoeing, there are others more subtle which may be attributed to it; and it needs no great stretch of the imagination, when we are let into secrets like these, to suppose that some cases even of glanders may be some day traced to ill-treatment of the foot.

Mr. Fearnley deplores that the spirit of specialism should be wanting amongst veterinary surgeons. In America, however, they have veterinary dentists, as we may learn from a treatise already quoted from in these chapters. Mr. Russell, ‘practical horseshoer,’ in his ‘Scientific Horseshoeing,’ says: ‘There