68 THE HORSE. 



forging a good, useful, and comfortable shoe for a 

 horse with sound feet, and fittino- and nailing the 

 same in a safe and proper manner. The difficulty- 

 lies with naturally defective or worn-out hoofs, which 

 the devil himself, or Vulcan, in propria persona, would 

 be unable to manage with any tolerable degree of 

 success. With respect to this man's shoe, and that 

 man's shoe, or which of them you will, out of the one 

 thousand and one, who have every one of them, each 

 in opposition and superiority to the other, during the 

 last half century, improved the horse shoe, patenteed, 

 or otherwise ; some within a degree and half of per- 

 fection, and others, two degrees beyond it. That 

 which may with any certainty be predicted of them 

 is, omne quod exit in hum, with the addition of the bug, 

 to those who prefer it. But new coined horse shoes 

 are fancy articles, thence cannot fail of due periodical 

 attention. 



SECTION XII.— A few Lines on the most 



PROMINENT FANCIFUL THEO RIES. 



To begin with the favourite of my early day, of which 

 I have Ions; since related how I got cured, the Sieur 

 La Fosse's short half-moon shoe, to compel the foot, 

 however unwilling, to obey the law of nature, and 

 bear upon the frog, as the rest, support, fulcrum, and 

 salient point to the tendon. This projector's brain 

 was so engrossed by his prevailing theory, a never 

 failing occurrence, that, experienced however he must 

 have been in southern horses, he slighted nature's own 

 hint in the want of sufficient frog for the purpose, in so 

 many thousands, and totally overlooked the effect of 



