64 HORSES AND ROADS. 



persevere for half-a-dozen years, until they were able 

 to establish generally in their stables, under diffi- 

 culties, a system which their good sense, in the 

 first place, and the experience they gradually gained, 

 in the second, told them was highly economical for 

 them and comfortable for their horses. It is not 

 every farmer that owns forty horses ; but in these 

 days of co-operation nothing could be easier than 

 for several farmers to agree among themselves to 

 patronise jointly the first forge in each district, the 

 owner of which would consent to meet their views. 

 Let them, in fact, strike against the farriers, or make 

 a lock-out. It only wants union among themselves, 

 but they must first be converted from their 

 own grooviness in respect to horse shoeing. 



The Lincolnshire farmers were obliged, only in 

 November last, to form a society for the suppression 

 of the administration of poisonous drugs by their 

 servants to their horses ; one of them stating at the 

 first meeting that, first and last, he had lost over 

 thirty horses through this odious, but almost univer- 

 sal, practice. Perhaps these same gentlemen would 

 excuse the suggestion that at their meetings shoeing 

 might also be profitably discussed. 



A remarkable discussion on shoeing, the heads of 

 which may be appropriately introduced here, took 

 place at the meeting of the Massachusetts Board of 

 Agriculture in. 1878. Mr. Eussell started by stating 

 that the safest way was to let the hind feet be bare, 

 and to shoe the fore feet with tips, or crescents of 

 iron, that only cover the toe Dr. Hunt, curiously 



