116 THE STUD, 



I have heard persons make a sweeping affirm- 

 ation that " they thought nothing " of curbs ; now 

 as I hold them to be of considerable importance, 

 one party, it may appear, must be wrong. Yet I 

 will endeavour to reconcile this apparently wide 

 difference of opinion. It is always dangerous, or 

 rather injudicious, to lay down any law without 

 qualification, and it is so to state that any one 

 thinks nothing of curbs. 



If a person says he thinks little of a horse 

 manifesting symptoms of curbs, or even throwing 

 out considerable enlargement on the curb place, I 

 quite jump with such opinion, for a recent exhibi- 

 tion of such only shows that we must (if we mean 

 a radical cure, and that without great blemish) 

 set to work immediately ^ in which case we may 

 generally feel assured of complete success : but a 

 rank and decided curb, I venture to say, is very 

 difficult to get rid of, and very often never is 

 cured. When I say cured, I do not mean that 

 the horse may not be useful and do his work, but 

 I only call a thing cured where the affected part 

 is brought to a state that enables it to perform all 

 its functions as well as it did before it became 

 disarranged. If we broke or strained the spring 

 of a carria2:e so as to be oblio;ed to send it to be 

 repaired, should we call the accident remedied, if 

 we found, on using the vehicle, that our teeth 

 chattered in our head on passing over a rough 



