254 I'HE HORSE. 



annoying to his driver, do not in any way tend to inflict injury on the 

 feet or limbs. The scooped or rolled toe confers a mechanical advan- 

 tage, enabling the animal to get over his toes more promptly and thus 

 remove the front foot from the stroke of the hind extremity, while the 

 lengthening of the branches of the hind shoes, by increasing the ground 

 surface, retards the flexion and extension of the hind limbs. 



The common practice of increasing the weight of the outside web of 

 the hind shoes, to open the action, is equally harmless and efficaciou? 

 when not carried to extremes. 



There are many other styles of shoes, the product of American in^ 

 genuity, for which probably equal merit might be claimed, but there are 

 others, which, while they may cure or mitigate the special defect against 

 which they are directed, only do so at the expense of some other por- 

 tion of the structure. It has many a time furnished food thought to the 

 writer, that, in this great commonwealth, while there are such a large 

 number of artificers who make horse-shoeing a profession, who offer 

 such convincing testimony of a vast amount of careful thought and pa- 

 tient study of at least some of the principles of their very important pro- 

 fession as many of these devices afford, the bulk of such work should be 

 permitted to fall into the hands of a set of incompetent, ignorant, and 

 ofttimes unprincipled bunglers, who prey upon the credulity of their 

 employers and inflict upon the most generous of all our dumb servants an 

 amount of injury which curtails the period of his usefulness and results 

 in his premature decadence at an age when he ought to be still in 

 his prime. 



In the meantime it behooves us to make the most of the means within 

 our power. Our horses are national property. Surely, therefore, it is 

 time that the possibility of a great national economy was recognized, and 

 some legislation formulated which would require an established standard 

 of attainment in a class of workmen to whose care property of such 

 value is habitually intrusted, and upon whose proficiency, or the reverse, 

 so much of its utility or comparative worthlessness depends, while it, 

 at the same time, provided for some means of practical instruction which 

 contemplated raising the science of horse-shoeing above the baneful in- 

 fluences of ignorance and traditional routine, to that position to which 

 importance to us as a people justly entitles it." 



