SOUNDNESS 19 



any person to purchase such a horse, unless at a price consonant 

 with the evident reduction of his value. It will be requisite, there- 

 fore, for us to say, not simply, that every lame horse is unsound, 

 but to add the words, or who has that about him which is likely on 

 work to render him lame. This will, it is true, open the door to 

 difference of opinion and equivocation. There may, as we have 

 seen, spring up two opinions concerning the presence even of lame- 

 ness. There will in more cases be two opinions concerning that 

 which is accounted to be the precursor of lameness, or have a tend- 

 ency at some period, proximate or remote, to produce lameness ; 

 all which differences are best got rid of by reference to the ablest 

 veterinary advice. There will be less diversity of opinion among 

 professional men than among others, and the more skilful and 

 respectable the professional persons are, the greater will be the pro- 

 bability of a happy unison in their views of the case. To lay 

 down any statute law which shall meet such cases as these is, 

 from the very nature of vital structures and functions, totally an 

 impossible matter. 



We ought to be able to establish it as an axiom, although it may 

 prove one not unassailable by argument, that a lame horse is an 

 unsound horse. It might be objected, for example, that a horse 

 having a stone in his foot — than which nothing, for the time, ren- 

 ders a horse more lame — should be regarded as unsound ; and yet 

 by this rule he must be so considered so long as he continues to go 

 lame, though as sound from the moment that the stone is removed. 

 The shoe " nailed on too tight" furnishes another similar example. 

 A horse, quite sound, enters a forge to be shod, and comes out going, 

 as grooms call it, " scrambling," i. e. lame ; he is, in fact, no longer a 

 sound horse : take him back, however, into the forge and remove 

 his shoes, nail them on " easy," and, if not completely restored to 

 soundness, he is thereby evidently so much relieved as to give pretty 

 fair earnest of his becoming well or as sound as ever by the next or 

 the following day. It may be said, and we quite agree in the re- 

 ply, that such trivial points as these are not likely to come before 

 us for decision, or to cause us any trouble if they do : still it is 

 right we should be armed on all sides to defend that law which we, 

 as professional men, deem it wholesome and just to lay down : viz. 



