150 NAVICULARTHRITIS. 



In one of our cavalry regiments, owing to an inordinate course of 

 field-day drilling, there existed at one time as many as 30 per 

 cent, of their horses lame, and most of the cases were evidently 

 navicularthritic. We may therefore safely set down work as a 

 grand excitant of navicularthritis. 



A vulgar saying amongst horse-folks is, that "it is the pace 

 that kills :" as veterinarians, we might with truth say, " it is the 

 pace that lamest We shall ever find most lame horses in situ- 

 ations where the feet are battered upon hard or stony ground ; 

 though such battering will not, as observed by me before, operate 

 with the same destructive effects where there does not exist the 

 same predisposition or susceptibility to take the disease, or rather 

 where its mischievous operation is — unwittingly, I believe — 

 guarded against by paring the foot and by shoeing. Nimrod— the 

 late Mr. Apperley — during the eight years he resided in France, 

 from observations made on horses in his own neighbourhood, as 

 well as from what he had seen in the course of his travels through 

 France, was led to exclaim — " How rare lame horses are in 

 France ; those lame in the feet especially !" sagaciously ascribing 

 so remarkable a difference between the horses of France and those 

 of our own country "to the comparatively slow pace at which 

 French horses travel ;" although a friend of his (Nimrod's) " a clever 

 mechanic," felt inclined to attribute the evil to differences between 

 the French and English methods of shoeing horses : " depend upon 

 it," his friend would say, " the French system of shoeing contri- 

 butes much to their soundness, as far as the feet are concerned, 

 by the superior method of nailing^'' For my own part, my ex- 

 planation of the fact — for fact and truth it appears to be— is, that, 

 frog-pressure being a grand cause of the evil, in France they get 

 rid of this not merely by paring the frogs away more than we do, but 

 by protecting them afterwards by thick strong-heeled shoes ; so that 

 while the frog of our English-shod horse is battered upon the road 

 and struck against every stone it meets Avith, the frog of the 

 French-shod horse is furnished with a couple of stout lateral de- 

 fences, between which it is raised up out of the way of blows and 



* See Nimrod's Account of Comparative Disease among English and 

 French Horses, in The Veteeinarian for 1839. 



