250 
N A VIC UL ARTHRITIS. 
and more regulated paces. Furthermore, distributing the whole 
number of cases — 239 — under the heads of the several months of 
the respective years in which they occurred, I find a very large 
proportion happening during the working months ; there being as 
many cases registered, on an average, during March, May, June, 
and July, as during the remaining eight months altogether. Some 
trifling diminution has appeared in the month of April, perhaps 
owing to the general showeriness and consequent wetness of the 
ground in that month. The prevalence in March has evidently 
owed its rise to the relapses — cases patched-up during the winter — - 
giving way again in the spring, as soon as work came to be renewed. 
In one of our cavalry regiments, owing to an inordinate course of 
field-day drilling, there existed at one time as many as 30 per 
cent, of their horses lame, and most of the cases were evidently 
navicularthritic. We may therefore safely set down work as a 
grand excitant of navicularthritis. 
A vulgar saying amongst horse-folks is, that "it is the pace 
that kills as veterinarians, we might with truth say, " it is the 
pace that lames” We shall ever find most lame horses in situ- 
ations where the feet are battered upon hard or stony ground ; 
though such battering will not, as observed by me before, operate 
with the same destructive effects where there does not exist the 
same predisposition or susceptibility to take the disease, or rather 
where its mischievous operation is — unwittingly, I believe — 
guarded against by paring the foot and by shoeing. Nimrod— -the 
late Mr. Apperley — during the eight years he resided in France, 
from observations made on horses in his own neighbourhood, as 
well as from what he had seen in the course of his travels through 
France, was led to exclaim — "How rare lame horses are in 
France; those lame in the feet especially!” sagaciously ascribing 
so remarkable a difference between the horses of France and those 
of our own country " to the comparatively slow pace at which 
French horses travel although a friend of his (Nimrod’s) " a clever 
mechanic,” felt inclined to attribute the evil to differences between 
the French and English methods of shoeing horses : " depend upon 
it,” his friend would say, " the French system of shoeing contri- 
butes much to their soundness, as far as the feet are concerned, 
by the superior method of nailing *” For my own part, my ex- 
planation of the fact — for fact and truth it appears to be— is, that, 
frog-pressure being a grand cause of the evil, in France they get 
rid of this not merely by paring the frogs away more than we do, but 
by protecting them afterwards by thick strong-heeled shoes ; so that 
while the frog of our English-shod horse is battered upon the road 
and struck against every stone it meets with, the frog of the 
* Sec Nimrod’s Account of Comparative Disease among English and 
French Horses, in The Veterinarian for 1839. 
