20 HORSES AND ROADS, 



shoe. Cowdung is supposed by these ignorant people 

 to be emollient, because it is soft ; but everything 

 that glitters is not necessarily gold, and cowdung 

 instead of being an emollient, is a powerful irritant ; 

 and so between ' ointment ' and ' stopping ' they are 

 using their utmost endeavours, in surrounding the 

 hoof on all sides with everything that ignorance and 

 stupidity can devise (up to the present time), to 

 render it brittle and otherwise diseased. 



As soon as the horse is taken, as a colt, from his 

 natural state into bondage, every one seems to con- 

 sider that his mother Nature has nothing more 

 to do with his future career. Everything then 

 is carried on by them without once casting a thought 

 on the dominion which she still maintains over him, 

 equally with all her other creatures. Some others 

 of the servants of man are less meddled with than 

 this one, who is, at the same time, the most costly 

 and the most generally useful — here in England, at 

 least. It has been well said that ' the history of 

 almost every horse in this kingdom is a struggle to 

 exist against human endeavours to deprive it of 

 utility.' This is forcible language, but it is the 

 naked truth. Another authority says : ' Strange to 

 say, he frequently suffers as much from ill-advised 

 kindness as he does from cruelty.' This last obser- 

 vation applies to the English farmer, only in so far 

 that, whilst wishing to be excessively kind to his 

 horses, he is often unwittingly laying himself 

 open to censure from want of having duly considered 

 how to treat them. No one can possibly accuse him 



