438 FRUSH. 



equally as well as leather for covering and protection. To narrow 

 or contracted feet, with strong and deep heels, no shoe possesses 

 half the virtue of a tip. Providing the frushy frog be, or 

 through the means recomnnended be brought to be, able to 

 bear the pressure from partial tread upon the ground, leaving 

 the heels unpared down, and substituting a tip for the plain 

 shoe, will really work wonders. Hardly any person who has 

 not made trial of this plan would credit the reports I myself — in 

 common with others — could make of it; I shall, therefore, not 

 attempt any further eulogy of the tip here, but simply, circum- 

 stances suiting, most strongly repeat my recommendation of it. 

 In wet weather, the tipped horse ought, most assuredly, to be 

 kept as much as possible out of wet ; but in dry weather, and 

 upon country roads, on such a foot as 1 have described, the tip 

 will answer all the purpose of the plain shoe. 



In dressing Frushes some distinctions will, in general, 

 require to be made between the horse intended afterwards to 

 go to work and the one we can afford or obtain permission to 

 lay up. In the former case, the state of the ground, wet or dry, 

 will have something to do with it. In any case, little or no 

 benefit can be expected to be derived from dressings superfi- 

 cially or imperfectly applied — applied by merely smearing over 

 the ragged or rotten parts of the frush rather than insinuating 

 them into the seat of the disease. For any permanent good to 

 be done, the entire deca5^ed or ragged covering of horn lining 

 and filling the cleft must be scooped out and got rid of; all the 

 dead horn, in fact, must be removed with the drawing-knife, 

 and the living horn and deep-seated diseased sensitive parts of 

 the cleft freely exposed ; and then, but not till then, may we 

 apply our dressings. To accomplish this, it may, indeed, in 

 inveterate and bad frushes, become necessar}- to cut away the 

 major part of the frog, or perhaps the whole of it, supposing it to 

 be under-run, which is sometimes the case. Notwithstanding 

 this, however, it is often in our power, in case of emergency or 

 compulsion, to send such horses to work by bolstering their dis- 

 eased frogs up with pledgets of tow, and defending them from 

 wet and dirt by leathern or gutta percha soles. In such a case, 

 however, the same sharp dressing is hardly applicable which 



