335 
DURING THE SCHOLASTIC YEAR 1851 - 52 . 
The symptom so characteristic, pointing , is not absolute ; 
though it becomes almost so in the absence of any other 
visible cause for the lameness. Where the animal has the 
disease in both feet, which is rare, he points, alternately, first 
one and then the other foot. 
Lameness makes its appearance, in navicularthritis, some- 
times instantaneously. The horse falls lame all at once, like 
one who has sprained a tendon or picked up a nail. 
When the disease attacks both limbs at once, it is not 
always, so to speak, expressed by actual lameness, but by a 
sort of short stepping ( raccourcissment ) in the fore limbs ; and 
this shortening of action is the more perceptible as the animal 
in whom it exists has his shoulders at liberty, and stamps the 
ground in action more than when sound : his shoulders become 
cold and stiff ( froides ), as is vulgarly said. This froideur 
(shoulder-stiffness) goes off with work, and the horse recovers 
his powers; though by degrees, after a time, under his con- 
tinued work, the first symptom, which had at the time 
something ephemeral about it, grows confirmed ; and now 
it becomes permanent, continued, or intermittent, or with 
various degrees of intensity, first one foot and then the other, 
or both feet at a time. 
Exploration of the foot, on the first attack of navicular- 
thritis, ordinarily discloses nothing which can be considered 
as specially indicative of the disease. There is nothing, 
either in the exterior form or aspect, or colour of the horn, 
or dimensions of the hoof, or in the heat , or sensibility appre- 
ciable by pressure or percussion of the homy box, which 
indicates that the enclosed parts are the seat of such grave 
alterations as we have described. This absence of every kind 
of physical or physiological symptom emanating from the 
horny box, may be regarded as sufficiently characteristic of 
itself; since, in point of fact, one discovers little in the navi- 
cular disease to account for the permanent lameness, and, 
above all, for the pointing of the foot, which would indicate 
pain in the plantar region. 
A horse crippled in both fore-feet from this disease, cannot 
move forward his fore-feet in consonance and degree with his 
hind, and the consequence is desharmonie between the two 
pairs of extremities. This movement the English call grog - 
giness, wishing thereby to express going such as is caused by 
drunkenness; but the gait of the groggy horse is not the un- 
steady vacillating walk of a drunken man ; but, on the 
contrary, is very energetic, and if the machine does not obey 
regularly and entirely the impulsion it receives, that is owing 
to the structural alterations which interfere with the functions 
