Page:Horses and roads.djvu/87

 Rh unshod horses galloping over the softest or roughest kind of ground in turn (say Dartmoor, for instance) may bear witness to. Such horses only roughly pick their way when at full gallop: they lift their feet high, and let them come down where chance may, in detail, direct them. The weight of the horse is only partially transmitted to the arched sole by the elasticity of other parts of the foot.

The hoof may be described as somewhat resembling a double slanting truncated conic section, with the biggest end on the ground, and semi-cloven behind. To superficial observers this may not be suggestive of great resisting powers to the superimposed weight of the horse; but, if we look inside the hoof, we find that things are all right—how could Nature possibly go wrong? The inside of the crust, instead of being smooth like the outside, is furnished with several hundreds of thin, flexible, horny plates, called laminae, set edgewise, very like the gills of a mushroom; whilst the coffin bone is covered with an exactly corresponding number of softer plates, which fit with the utmost nicety between, and adhere most closely to, the first-mentioned plates. This beautiful arrangement gives an adhesive surface on both the crust and the coffin bone, many thousands of times greater than the hoof measures in girth; and thus the weight of the horse is attached to, and suspended by, the crust, and only partially coming down on the frog and sole at times, and in irregular amount and force, and always finding delicate compound arrangements