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 46 they are harnessed. If they were a little more observant they would discover that these horses were sounder in their feet and legs than are our London cab horses, which are shod to death, and most of them unsound and lame on all four feet (or legs).

By our ordinary mode of shoeing, in which about seven nails is the average we employ in each hoof, we are still doing, to a certain extent, the mischief of which La Fosse was guilty. We wedge up and compress the horn with the nails to the extent of about one-twelfth instead of one-fourth. How, then, can we wonder if the hoof, deprived of its full supply of nourishment round its edges, becomes brittle and dry? Can ‘hoof ointments’ or cowdung supply the place of the natural secretions? Mr. Miles, a Devonshire squire, for many years used three nails only on his own horses, and he found them all the better. He had not reflected on the reasons above stated (they are original with the writer, who thought them out for himself, and has never seen them referred to in any work, otherwise he would have acknowledged the source from which he got them, as he always does when he draws upon others); but he was in search of means which might allow expansion and contraction, and he put only one nail on the inside of the foot, and near the toe, the two remaining nails being on the outside part of the hoof. This gentleman made very clever practical experiments as to the extent of natural expansion and contraction; and in his work, ‘Miles on the