SECKETARY'S REPORT, ;149 



for the foot ; so that even were the crust made level, onlj its outside 

 edge could touch the shoe. Then the heels, instead of being level, 

 slope to each other at a not very obtuse angle, the foot being ifi this 

 part of the shoe, instead of on it, and performing the action of a 

 wedge every time it receives the animal's weight. And to keep all 

 these vicious contrivances in action, it is fixed with five nails on 

 each side driven back to the very heels. No wonder the poor beast 

 from which it was removed, went hirpling lame ; the wonder would 

 have been had it been otherwise. Yet it was no uncommon thino; to 

 see the same form of shoe in daily use on many of the best heavy 

 horses in the city, and the owners all the time complaining of the 

 badness of their feet. 



But the cause of corns is often to be found in the way the foot is 

 prepared. I have already adverted to the buttris as being instru- 

 mental in the production of long toes. It is equally so in that of 

 corns. Of this no better proof is needed than the disappearance of 

 the one simultaneous with the disuse of the other ; this has happened 

 generally in Britain within the last thirty or forty years, and par- 

 ticularly in the practice of regimental shoeing. 



Professor Coleman, of the Veterinary College of London, writing 

 in 1809, says: "There are very few horses that are not attacked 

 with corns. This is so common a disease, that nine hundred horses 

 out of a thousand have it." Mr. Percival, Veterinary Surgeon to 

 the First Life Guards, in his work on lameness in horses, published 

 in 1852, says : " That faulty shoeing is the chief and predominant 

 cause of corns, cannot anywhere receive more satisfactory demon- 

 stration than in the Army. Corns, and quittors, and contracted 

 feet, were in former days as rife in the Cavalry as in other places, 

 whereas at' the present day these diseases are all but unknown to 

 Veterinary Surgeons of Begiments ; and all is owing to an amended 

 practice of shoeing." 



My own experience, if it could add anything to the above, is this : 

 During seven years practice immediately preceding my coming here, 

 I did not meet with more than five or six cases of lameness from 

 corns ; and in a record of more than a thousand cases that I kept 

 during a part of that time, noting them in the order in which I 

 treated them, there is only one of corns, and that a slight one. Since 

 I came here, there are few days that I do not see horses lame from 



