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those belonging to the same horse. The resemblances are 

 general, not particular. 



VARIETIES OF FEET— HOW PRODUCED. 



Professor Gerard, in his Treatise on the Foot, enumerates 

 no less than twenty varieties of feet to be met with either in a 

 natural or diseased state. Spooner, in his Treatise on the 

 Foot, alleges that the various appearances and arrangements of 

 the parts of the foot, "will admit of almost as many varieties 

 as the arrangement of an equal number of the letters of the 

 alphabet." The general causes of these diversities of shape 

 and form arise mainly out of the necessity for affixing a metal- 

 lic protection, by means of nails, to the foot ; affixing it in an 

 unscientific manner, and by neglect and mismanagement in the 

 stable. 



The fundamental proximate cause of these varieties of de- 

 parture from the general healthy form is the inherent property 

 horn possesses, by which a change of form can be induced by the 

 operation of other causes. It is growing more or less rapidly 

 all the time, and from this cause alone an easy shoe to-day 

 may be a tight one in the course of a week or a fortnight, and 

 may be producing a gradual change in form, by a passive resist- 

 ance to expansion of the hoof from growth, inducing thereby a 

 gradual contraction of its fibres and a consequent gradual 

 alteration in form and structure, of the hoof. 



THE EFFECTS OF A DRY ATMOSPHERE. 



Experience has taught me that horses' feet are injuriously 

 affected by an unusually dry condition of the atmosphere. 

 They become hard, dry, and contracted, in the ordinary sense 

 of the term, and the most frequent result of these conditions is 

 a split or crack, chiefly in the inside quarter, where the wall is 

 thinnest, and most readily gives way. I believe that of every 

 twenty horses that I treated for lameness in Colorado, eighteen 

 of them were affected with a split hoof, which I could only 

 attribute to the extreme dryness of the atmosphere, a condition 



