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CONTRIBUTIONS TO VETERINARY SCIENCE. 
By J. Morn, M.V.C.E., late L.T.C. 
REMARKS ON GENOESE MULES. 
These mules are short, thick, compact animals, and 
beautifully adapted for carrying burdens. Their usefulness 
in campaigning would exceed that of every other class of 
mules were it not for their aptitude to double over in their 
posterior phalangeal joints, which impaired and rendered a 
large proportion of them useless during the late Crimean 
campaign. The disposition with them to “ knuckle” is so 
great that a slight scratch on the posterior region of the 
fetlock and foot was often sufficient to make them walk 
using chiefly the anterior wall and toe of the foot as the 
ground surface. In every disease situated in the posterior 
or lateral parts of the foot and fetlock, it was imperatively 
necessary, as the chief auxiliary means of effecting a cure, to 
have them shod with a shoe having a lever five or six inches 
long appended to it. The shoes adopted by the Genoese 
farriers were, in some respects, well constructed to counteract 
this evil. 
The shoe used by them is of a wedge and staple-like 
form ; breadth of web across the toe about two inches, 
at or near the heels one inch ; thickness at the anterior part 
half an inch, tapering to the heels to an almost inappreciable 
thickness. They stamp the nail-holes round the inner margin 
of the shoe. Their method of preparing the foot for the 
shoe is decidedly objectionable. They appear to have an 
unconquerable antipathy to reduce the foot, with the excep- 
tion of a small portion at the toe, which they remove. The 
frog they almost entirely excavate. The heels, which they 
ought chiefly to lower, are left untouched. They so adapt the 
shoe as to leave it projecting considerably at the toe, and more 
or less all round the inferior border of the foot. They attach 
the shoe by means of short nails having thick, clumsy, 
counter-sunk heads. They drive them firm, taking a con- 
siderable hold of the sole, after which the nail is acutely 
directed to the outside where they nip off the point and un- 
ceremoniously clench the nails without, as they say, uselessly 
resorting to the rasp. 'i 
11 the heels of the shoe project posteriorly, they double 
them up round the heel of the foot. 
A few of the predisposing causes which this inveterate 
