138 Management and TreaUneiit of the Horse, 



great suffering. Occasionally we have suppura- 

 tion in the fissure, sloughing of the laminae, 

 caries of the bone, superfluous granulation, and 

 in very severe cases the animal gives up, refuses 

 all food, sinks and dies. Mr. Greaves, in a letter 

 in the Veterinarian^ vol. 48, p. 72, says, '^ I fully 

 believe that in many cases there is a constitutional 

 tendency to sandcrack, for if we get the fissure 

 to grow out and entirely disappear in one place, 

 another crack will make its appearance in another 

 part of the hoof. We often notice that the horse 

 with a sandcrack in one foot, whether it be hind 

 or fore, will sooner or later have another sand- 

 crack in one of the other feet." The author 

 cannot flill into the view of Mr. Greaves upon 

 the constitutional point of the disease, unless, 

 indeed, the patient has an hereditary malforma- 

 tion of the foot, as some horses have. Colts 

 by Snowstorm, for instance, have most of them 

 one club foot. I am more in favour of the view 

 taken by my friend Mr. Broad, of Bath. In 

 a conversation I once had with him about this 

 disease, he said, " The majority of cases of sand- 

 crack that came under his notice for treatment 

 were those that occur in the toes of heavy cart 

 horses ; they do not arise as the effects of dry- 

 ness or the defects of the horn itself, as, on the 

 contrary, they occur in the strongest and thickest 

 of hoofs which are defective in shape, being 

 mostly very upright, so that when the horse is 

 shod with high caulkings — the principal cause — 

 and put to excessively heavy pulling, the front 

 part of the hoof gets more strain upon it than 



