LAMENESS. 
303 
the acutest veterinarians will dispute about its existence, and at 
the other end that which has characteristically received the deno- 
mination of dead lameness. Pain, though commonly the result of 
inflammation, may however, exist, occasioning lameness of a most 
unbearable character, without it ; the cases of the stone in the 
foot and the tight shoe being, as was before observed, examples 
of this. Another illustration is likewise afforded by the kick one 
horse every now and then receives from another horse upon his 
cannon bone ; than which, as every body knows, nothing for the 
time causes more exquisite pain or produces greater lameness. 
INABILITY, in one form or another, in the absence of pain, will 
be found to be the proximate cause of lameness. The dislocation of 
the patella occasions no pain, and yet the horse is too lame even to 
move. The partial or complete anchylosis of a joint may cease to 
be attended with pain, and yet there may be permanent and irre- 
moveable lameness. Parts in their natural condition possessing 
elasticity or motion one upon the other may from the effects of 
inflammation become glued together, or converted from soft into 
hard brittle tissues, and the result be lameness continuing long after 
all inflammatory action and pain has departed : examples of this 
daily meet our eyes, amongst the numberless horses — hunters espe- 
cially — there are, lame from “ bunged” or ossified legs. A horse 
may have a tumour of a magnitude or in a situation that interferes 
with progression, and so causes lameness ; and yet the tumour 
itself may be altogether of a painless description. A form inability 
now and then assumes is that of 
Weakness in the Limbs ; by which is to be understood, diminish- 
ed power or tone in their muscular or elastic parts. This “ weak- 
ness,” as it is called, may be the result either of disease or of hard 
work, or, on the other hand, it may proceed from long-continued 
inaction. A horse suddenly stricken with influenza manifests such 
weakness in his limbs as hardly to be able to walk. Here the 
debility is a direct effect of disease ; but it may be an indirect 
effect, and in this way : — A horse dislocates his stifle : the power 
and tone of the muscles of the dislocated limb remain for the time 
undiminished, as indeed would speedily be evinced were the patella 
pushed into its place again ; suffer the bone, however, to remain in 
a state of dislocation for a length of time, the limb continuing 
through necessity all the while in inaction, and the result will be 
shrinking and atrophy of its muscles, and consequent manifestation 
of weakness and lameness. Indeed, a horse may be kept in a stall 
tied up to his crib for so long a time, that when led out again he will 
be found to have all but lost the use of his limbs. The weakness en- 
gendered in the limbs by over-work every body recognizes. The 
windgalls, the swollen and round sinews, the knuckling-over, the 
