L1NNEAN SOCIETY OF LONDON. 



XXU1 



married and settled at Lausanne. On the passage to Hamburg, how- 

 ever, in a Yarmouth packet-boat, the vessel was captured by an 

 American privateer, and taken into a Dutch port, where the pas- 

 sengers received some hard treatment, and were robbed of all they 

 possessed, though Mr. Clark's loss fortunately does not appear to 

 have been heavy. He remained on the Continent for about two 

 years, and travelled through Holland, Denmark, Germany and 

 Switzerland at a time when travelling was not quite so easy as in 

 the present peaceful times ; and many testimonials are extant of 

 the consideration he obtained among men of science for his in- 

 dustry, intelligence, and energy. Having in vain endeavoured to 

 obtain permission to enter France with the view of studying at 

 the celebrated veterinarv schools of Paris and Lvons, he returned 

 to England, and commenced practice in London, where he soon 

 attained the most eminent position in his profession. In the course 

 of his practice he appears very early to have felt that it was out 

 of the natural order of things that horses should, after some years' 

 usage, so often become lame, a term under which he included every 

 defect in stepping, and in the detection of which he possessed a 

 very keen eye. In his ' Hippodamia, ' he has left a very interesting 

 account of his researches into the cause of this lameness, which were 

 rewarded by a discovery, in his own estimation at any rate, " second 

 to none that has ever been made on the subject of horses." This 

 was what. he termed the "principle" of the elasticity or expan- 

 sibility of the animal's foot. This so-termed " principle," however, 

 had been previously recognized by Mr. Freeman in his work on 

 the 1 Mechanism of the Horse's Foot,' which was published in 1796. 

 At the present day, we can only wonder that so obvious a fact 

 should ever have been overlooked by the most barbarous farrier, 

 and that it should have been reserved for the last sixty or seventy 

 years to erect it into a "principle." 



The application, however, of this "principle " in the shoeing of 

 horses seems to have been a more difficult problem than its dis- 

 covery, and to have engaged the attention and laborious ingenuity 

 of many veterinarians. Mr. Clark was occupied more or less in 

 the solution of the question up to the last year of his long life, and, 

 in fact, his experiments in this regard appear to have absorbed 

 no small portion of the very considerable gains he made by the 

 practice of his profession. His zeal in this subject we cannot per- 

 haps wonder at, when we learn that, in his opinion, the horse 

 would attain to the age of fifty, were it not for the cruel sufferings 

 occasioned by the imprisonment of its feet, the cutting of the frog, 



