Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 18.djvu/496

 480 proper functions of any part of its body (and the abomination of bearing-reins and other such practices interfere with them grievously and even fatally), we bring it under no conditions which it was not designedly calculated to encounter. Private owners and companies whose horses must be numbered by troops are naturally irritated by the accidents constantly occurring on smooth and slimy pavements or on rough and hard stone or flint roads, and in their disgust they now offer rewards for the invention of a shoe which shall render the horse indifferent to the materials over which he has to pass, and clamor for a uniform system of pavements in all towns. It seems strange indeed that no misgiving seems to cross their minds that they are taking thought of the wrong surface, and that they are scared by false terrors when they dread the contact of the unshod hoof with sand, granite, flint, wood, or asphalt.

It can not, indeed, be too often repeated or too strongly insisted on, that the foot of the horse in no way needs to rest on soft and yielding surfaces. The very opposite of this is the truth, and this truth was perceived as clearly by Xenophon as by the ablest physiologists of our own day. Speaking, as he says, not from theory, but from wide and varied experience, Xenophon insists that, in order to insure the healthiness of horses, stable-floors must not be smooth or damp, that they should be lined with stones of irregular shapes, of much the same size as the animal’s hoof, and that the ground outside the stable, on which it is groomed, should be covered in parts with loose stones laid down in large quantities, but surrounded by an iron rim to prevent their being scattered. Standing on these, the horse, Xenophon adds, will be in much the same condition as if he were traveling on a stony road, and, as he must move his hoof when he is being rubbed down as much as when he is walking, the stones thus spread about will strengthen the frogs of his feet. It is not easy to repress a certain feeling of shame at the disingenuousness of modern writers who have tried to shirk the difficulty by saying that Xenophon had no knowledge of our hard roads. It is enough to reply that he speaks distinctly of roads covered with stones, and of the benefit which the horse derives from traversing them. There is not a word to justify a suspicion that he would have shrunk from the hardest roadway of modern times. Xenophon is thus in complete agreement with Lord Pembroke’s remark, that the constant use of litter in a stable makes the feet tender and causes swelled legs. In his judgment the bare stone pavement will cool, harden, and improve a horse’s feet merely by his standing on it. Acting on the same principle, Vegetius, as “Free Lance” remarks, holds that the floor of the stable should be made, not of soft wood, but of solid hard oak, which will make the foot of the horse as hard as a rock. It should surely be unnecessary to say that these writers make not the remotest reference or allusion to the shoeing of horses. It was impossible that they could notice a practice which was unknown