308 DISEASES OF THE HORSE. 
of course, producing reversed effects. In other words, when the ani- 
mal in trotting exhibits signs of irregularity of action, or lameness, 
and this irregularity is accompanied with dropping or nodding the 
head, or depressing the hip on the right side of the body, at the time 
the feet of the right side strike the ground, the horse is lame on the 
left side. If the dropping and nodding are on the near side the lame- 
ness is on the off side. 
In a majority of cases, however, the answer to the first question re- 
lating to the lameness of a horse is, after all, not a very difficult task. 
There are two other problems in the case more difficult of solution 
and which often require the exercise of a closer scrutiny, and draw 
upon all the resources of the experienced practitioner to settle satis- 
factorily. That a horse is lame in a given leg may be easily deter- 
mined, but when it becomes necessary to pronounce upon the query as 
to what part, what region, what structure is affected, the easy part 
of the task is over, and the more difficult and important, because more 
obscure, portion of the investigation has commenced—except, of 
course, in cases of which the features are too distinctly evident to the 
senses to admit of error. It is true that by carefully noting the 
manner in which a lame leg is performing its functions, and closely 
scrutinizing the motions of the whole extremity, and especially of 
the various joints which enter into its structure; by minutely ex- 
amining every part of the limb; by observing the outlines; by tésting 
the change, if any, in temperature and the state of the sensibility— 
all these investigations may guide the surgeon to a correct locali- 
zation of the seat of trouble, but he must carefully refrain from the 
adoption of a hasty conclusion, and, above all, assure himself that 
he has not failed to make the foot, of all the organs of the horse 
the most liable to injury and lesion, the subject of the most thorough 
and minute examination of all the parts which compose the suffering 
extremity. 
The greater liability of the foot than of any other part of the 
extremities to injury from casualties, natural to its situation and use, 
should always suggest the beginning of an inquiry, especially in an 
obscure case of lameness at that point. Indeed the lameness may 
have an apparent location elsewhere when that is the true seat of the 
trouble, and the surgeon who, while examining his lame patient, 
discovers a ringbone, and convincing himself that he has encoun- 
tered the cause of the disordered action-suspends his investigation 
without subjecting the foot to a close scrutiny, at a later day when 
regrets will avail nothing, may deeply regret his neglect and inad- 
vertence. As in human pathological experience, however, there are 
instances when inscrutable diseases will deliver their fatal messages, 
while leaving no mark and making no sign by which they might be 
jdentified and classified. so it will happen that in the humbler ani- 
