LINNEAN SOCIETY OF LONDON. | XXlil 
married and settled at Lausanne. On the passage to Hamburg, how- 
ever, in a Yarmouth packet-boat, the vessel was captured by an 
American privateer, and taken into a Dutch port, where the pas- 
sengers received some hard treatment, and were robbed of all they 
possessed, though Mr. Clark’s loss fortunately does not appear to 
have been heavy. He remained on the Continent for about two 
years, and travelled through Holland, Denmark, Germany and 
Switzerland at a time when travelling was not quite so easy as in 
the present peaceful times; and many testimonials are extant of 
the consideration he obtained among men of science for his in- 
dustry, intelligence, and energy. Having in vain endeavoured to 
obtain permission to enter France with the view of studying at 
the celebrated veterinary schools of Paris and Lyons, he returned 
to England, and commenced practice in London, where he soon 
attained the most eminent position in his profession. In the course 
of his practice he appears very early to have felt that it was out 
of the natural order of things that horses should, after some years’ 
usage, so often become Jame, a term under which he included every 
defect in stepping, and in the detection of which he possessed a 
very keen eye. In his ‘ Hippodamia,’ he has left a very interesting 
account of his researches into the cause of this lameness, which were 
rewarded by a discovery, in his own estimation at any rate, “ second 
to none that has ever been made on the subject of horses.” This 
was what le termed the “principle” of the elasticity or expan- 
sibility of the animal’s foot. This so-termed “ principle,” however, 
had been previously recognized by Mr. Freeman in his work on 
the ‘ Mechanism of the Horse’s Foot,’ which was published in 1796. 
At the present day, we can only wonder that so obvious a fact 
should ‘ever have been overlooked by the most barbarous farrier, 
and that it should have been reserved for the last sixty or seventy 
years to erect it into a “ principle.” 
The application, however, of this “ principle” in the shoeing of 
horses seems to have been a more difficult problem than its dis- 
covery, and to have engaged the attention and laborious ingenuity 
of many veterinarians. Mr. Clark was occupied more or less in 
the solution of the question up to the last year of his long life, and, 
in fact, his experiments in this regard appear to have absorbed 
no small portion of the very considerable gains he made by the 
practice of his profession. His zeal in this subject we cannot per- 
haps wonder at, when we learn that, in his opinion, the horse 
would attain to the age of fifty, were it not for the cruel sufferings 
occasioned by the imprisonment of its feet, the cutting of the frog, 
