430 FRUSH. 



was a disease that could be called universal among horses, this 

 may be said to be the one. Everybody's horse has a frush, 

 and yet nobody appears to be concerned about the matter. 

 Horses, in general, seem to go as well with frushes as without 

 them ; hence the reason of so little or no notice being taken of 

 their presence : added to which, the circumstance affords a 

 pretty convincing proof that the judge in a court of law, who, 

 in former times, pronounced frush to constitute unsoundness, 

 erred most egregiously in his fiat justitia. 



A Frush is not to be accounted Unsoundness unless 

 it produces lameness, which it rarely does.- A horse having an 

 ordinary frush will go as far, and as well — save that he may 

 perhaps at times " drop" from treading upon a stone — as one 

 whose frogs are in a normal condition ; and therefore cannot in 

 reason be regarded as unsound. And besides, were a frush to 

 be viewed as unsoundness, there would be found perhaps more 

 unsound than sound horses in the country; in fact, according to 

 such a notion, hardly anybody would possess a sound horse. But 



Frushes are not so common now-a-days as they were 

 some years ago. This is one of the fruits of an improved practice 

 of shoeing; though so long as shoeing shall exist in any thing like 

 its present form, supposing there were no other cause for the dis- 

 ease, we should still have frushes. Constituted as the frog is, both 

 as regards its own structure and its relation to other parts of 

 the foot, it is quite impossible it can, in the state of constriction 

 in which the whole foot is held by the shoe, perform to the full its 

 natural functions ; and being unable to do so, the hoof gradually 

 contracts and shrinks, in spite of every contrivance through 

 shoeing to prevent it ; and though, by very good management 

 on the part of the smith, and little proneness to such affection 

 on the part of the foot, frushes are in some instances kept 

 aloof, the frog is still too apt to become, in the course of time, a 

 shrunk, sharp, narrow body, meanly comparable to what it, in 

 the colt's foot, originally was. The observation of this fact it is 

 that has led to the development of one of the 



Causes of Frush, and that, too, the most general one. The 

 frog was given to the foot for important purposes; and Nature 



