SECRETARY'S REPORT. 



137 



■were mexnt. In writinf; my ideas, therefore, on horse-shoeing. I had 

 no wish that thej shoalJ be looked upon as a complete or formal 

 treatise on the subject. So rainy of these having already been 

 published by men eminent in the art, as to supply to the scientific 

 or inquiring reader all the information nearly, that books can give. 

 My object Avas of a less pretending but more practical character, 

 namely, to point out the errors most commonly fiUen into as the 

 thing was done among ourselves, the effects of these errors, and 

 their remedy. 



The first thing that took the notice, at the time I wrote, of any 

 one accustomed to see horses well shod, on lookins; at the feet of 

 almost all he met here, was the preposterous length of the toes. So 

 strange inde&d did this feature seem to me at first, that I doubted if 

 the internal parts of the foot could be the same as those I had been 

 used to see elsewhere, or if nature had not in a freak made them 

 different here from what they are in other places. Subsequent in- 

 spection however showed me that this was not the case, that nature 

 forms the feet of horses here the same as every where else, and that 

 the absurd and often ludicrous forms I saw them fashioned into, was 

 only the work of the shoeing smith. 



Fig. 1. 



