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 82 mankind could afford to endure all evils before it could afford to question the perfectibility of mortal invention. There is no accounting for incongruities when men, deserting reason, consent to adopt routine as a guide. Veterinary surgeons attribute to shoeing all the evils with which the hoof is affected. Veterinary surgeons are somewhat slow in adopting new ideas; but seem, with the firmness and tenacity ignorance displays towards a favourite superstition, to love and cling to the practices in which they have been educated.’ Some people cling to the superstition that nailing a horseshoe on the door keeps out the witches. The shoe does, certainly, less harm on the door than on the horse’s foot; but to nail it on the latter is a superstition utterly unworthy of the civilisation and intelligence of the English nation in the nineteenth century. Future historians will place upon record that an appeal had to be made to us, in the year of grace 1880, to abandon the use of artificial foundations tacked on to a living creation of God; and these historians will not fail to throw further shame on us by pointing out the fact that semi-civilised nations, with whose customs we were conversant, were able to work the horse harder than we did without any protection to his feet.

In the retreat of the French army from Moscow, the horses lost all their shoes before they reached the Vistula. Yet they found their way to France over rough, hard, frozen ground.