134 
The Principles of Horse- Shoeing. 
are remarkably sound and tough, yet they found, from long 
experience, that in journeying on rocky ground these soon 
became so much worn that lameness ensued. And so it was 
that when a traveller started on a long journey among the 
mountains, he was furnished with a dozen or two of these 
straw slippers, which were attached to his saddle. When his 
hack began to limp he had to dismount and tie a pair of these 
curious contrivances on the front feet, and as their durability 
was not great, the operation had to be performed at brief in- 
tervals. The only consolation the traveller could discover under 
these circumstances, was in the fact that these sandals were 
very cheap, and could be bought in every village. Having to 
purchase a great number of Japanese horses for the use of the 
army during our advance on Peking, several of my farriers were 
sent to Japan to attend to them, and the natives for the first 
time saw iron shoes attached to hoofs by nails. Though much 
astonished at first, they soon availed themselves of the Western 
invention, and it is now probably well known to every denizen 
of that enterprising kingdom as the most efficient and least 
troublesome mode of preventing lameness in their horses from 
hard travelling. 
When the art of shoeing was invented, it is difficult to ascer- 
tain. I have devoted many years' research to the settlement of 
this question, and in tracing the history of horse-shoeing from 
the earliest up to the present time. The result of these labours 
has been given in my work on ' Horse-shoes and Horse- 
shoeing,' but it may here be mentioned that there is some pro- 
bability that it was known about B.C. 300, as a beautiful coin of 
Tarentum — a small island near Brindisi — of that date repre- 
sents a horse being shod. It is not improbable that the Gauls 
and Celts shod their horses as we now shoe them, horse-shoes 
and nails having been found in Gaulish graves- — especially in 
Alesia, where the Gauls made their last stand against the 
Romans ; and they have also been discovered with Ancient 
British remains in this country. They have certainly been 
found with Roman remains in many parts of England, and 
numbers of these shoes and nails figure in our museums — as at 
York and Canterbury, and in the Guildhall and the British 
Museum. All these Roman and pre-Roman horse-shoes and 
nails, British and Continental, are peculiar ; they are exactly of 
the same shape, and nearly of the same dimensions, which are 
small — proving that the native horses were rather under-sized. 
The discovery of horse-shoes with British and Roman remains 
in this country disposes of the assertion, which is often repeated 
in 'Haydn's Dictionary of Dates,' that the art of shoeing was 
introduced into England by William the Conqueror. 
