244 STATE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



njurcd by small gravel stones working between the sole of the foot and the 

 shoe; and though it has been my fortune never to have met with a case of this 

 kind, I can easily understand that such might bo the condition in case of the 

 seated shoe ; but witii tlio ])lain siioe properly set such an accident would be 

 next to impossible. The plain shoe will clear itself of mud or snow much more 

 readily than will the other form, and is not liable to be lost by being torn off 

 by suction while the horse is traveling over heavy roads. The ilat shoe may 

 be repaired quite as easily as the seated, and made to wear quite as long. 

 During the winter, when we are liable to have ice, we must have shar]) calkins 

 for horses that have worn shoes during the summer; and as a shoe for this 

 season I have taken the narrow, plain shoe, as I have described it, and turned 

 down calkins as short as the smith could make them on his anvil. By this 

 means the horse is not thrown up so far from the ground and travels better and 

 more securely than he could with longer calkins. I do not for a moment pre- 

 tend that the shoe I have brought before you is a great discovery in horseshoe- 

 ing, nor that it is the shoe of the age, but that it is a very simple one and at 

 the hand of any farmer or horseman who chooses to use it, and one which will 

 be found a great advantage to the majority of farm horses for six or eight 

 months of the year. There may be horses for which this form of shoe is un- 

 adapted, but they are very rare exceptions, and I have yet to find one. The 

 plain shoe requires to be set with a great deal of care on the part of the smith, 

 as indeed ought every shoe. In the first place the shoe should be made for the 

 foot, for never was a horse's foot made for a shoe. At the first shoeing of the 

 colt the foot should be kept at its natural angle, and ever afterwards this angle 

 should be maintained. In preparing the foot for the shoe there are but two 

 instruments that should be allowed to touch the hoof; they are the butteris 

 and the rasp. There is, however, another instrument of which most of shoeing 

 smiths are very fond, namely: the drawing knife, which has a curved blade, 

 and it is with this knife that the narrow bearing surface of the sole is produced. 

 The curved blade is well adapted for cutting out the concave surface of the 

 sole, which never should be touched by the smith. In using the butteris and 

 rasp a plain flat surface is left, which in a healthy fore foot presents a regular 

 outline; but in the hind feet we find a distinct curve outward, the outside 

 quarter forming a process upon the foot, as it were, but in this country the 

 smith entirely ignores this process, and from the time the colt receives his first 

 set of shoes to that of his last in old age, it is carefully rasped off, in order to 

 give the foot a better shai:)e perhaps; but it is simply a mutilation of one of 

 nature's beautiful works, and should be known by its proper name. I am sure 

 that if a smith would compare the graceful outline left in soft ground by an 

 unshod colt's hind feet with the hard, studied curves left beside them by the 

 hind feet of older horses, which are his own handwork, he would feel within 

 him a sense of shame and humiliation that would forbid him ever again to try 

 to improve upon nature. A flat bearing surface having been made on the sole 

 of the hoof by means of the butteris and rasp, the shoe should be carefully 

 fitted to it, the superior face of the shoe to the surface and the external border 

 of the shoe to the external and inferior margin of the hoof, whatever its form 

 may be, if natural ; and the fitting should be done with the shoe cooled, so 

 that it will not singe the horn. AVhen the shoe has been fitted in this way 

 there will be no occasion for rasping the outside of the wall, and another cause 

 of contracted feet will be avoided. 



Gentlemen, there are many other forms of shoes, some of them having great 

 advantages and others being purely for surgical purposes, but time will forbid 



