LAMENESS IN HOUSES. 
603 
hind, and having in action greater force thrown upon them. 
The same reasoning will apply to the inner heel of the fore foot, 
as accounting for its being oftener the seat of corn than the 
outer. Also, the inner heel of the shoe is usually made a closer 
fit than the outer, and consequently, in the case of any dila- 
tation of the hoof, it is more likely to slide inward upon the sole; 
added to which, the inner heel is weaker and less able to bear 
weight than its fellow, although it frequently has to support 
more. 
That faulty shoeing is the chief and predominant cause of 
corn cannot any where receive more satisfactory demonstration 
than in the Army. Corns and quittors and contracted feet 
were, in former days, as rife in the cavalry as in other places; 
whereas, at the present day, these diseases are all but unknown 
to veterinary surgeons in the army. And all is owing to an 
amended practice of shoeing. In the late Professor Coleman’s 
Lecture on the subject, delivered in the year 1809, I find the 
following passages: — “There are very few horses that are not 
attacked with corn” — “This is so common a disease, that nine 
hundred horses out of a thousand have it.” What would be 
thought of a veterinary lecturer making such observations at 
the time present] Proof as this is of the share bad or improper 
shoeing has had in the production of corn, it is not to be denied 
that 
OTHER Causes exist. Contracted feet are known on occa- 
sions to generate corns, and in them corns cannot be said, but 
by accident, to owe their production to shoeing. In these cases, 
it would appear that the sole, from growing thick and unyielding, 
or possibly from its becoming anormally concave at the angles, 
offers the impediment to the descending tendency of this part of 
the foot, and thus occasions, the same as the shoe would, a bruise, 
between the horny sole and the coffin-bone, of the sensitive 
sole. Most writers, however, attribute this to lateral pressure, 
resulting from contraction; which, in fact, is making contraction 
a cause of corn. Both Blaine and Youatt ascribe it to what 
they term “ wiring in ” of the heels of the wall ; though Cole- 
man never attributed any other ill effects to contraction of the 
hoof beyond that of compressing the laminae at the heels. 
The Pathology of Corn will vary with the stage it hap- 
pens to be in at the time. A recent corn consists in no more 
than an ecchymosis or extravasation of blood, the consequence 
of violent compression or contusion of the villous tissue of the 
sensitive sole. Should the blood have transuded, as it com- 
monly does more or less into the pores of the horn, whenever 
the shoe is taken off the foot, redness of the part will render 
the corn apparent ; though now and then the corn place requires 
