LAMENESS IN HORSES. 
419 
and danger compared to one in the ordinary, situation, and so far 
we would and ought to make distinctions between splints : further 
than this, however, all specification appears groundless and useless. 
A SPLINT IS detected by grasping with the hand the horse’s 
suspected leg in the ordinary manner, and tracing, with the fingers 
upon one side and the thumb upon the other, the inner and outer 
splint bones from their heads downwards to their tapering extre- 
mities. Any actual exostosis will at once arrest the hand ; any 
rising or irregularity will create suspicion, and lead to closer exa- 
mination. 
The Nature of Splint, from what has been already stated, 
may be said to have been anticipated. Conversion of that which 
originally was fibro-cartilage into bone, between the splint and 
cannon bones, constitutes splint, be tumour or exostosis the con- 
sequence, or be it not. Here, then, we have another kind of 
splint, one that we may call insidious , invisible, or undetectible 
splint. We are not certain that a splint of this latter description 
gives rise to lameness; but that, in essence, it is a splint as much 
as the exostosis is which stands out an inch from the bone of the 
leg, is most certain. But what is 
The pathological History of Splint] How comes it 
that this useful fibro-cartilage becomes transubstantiated into 
useless bone ] The immediate or proximate cause we believe 
to be, increased action, amounting in some instances to inflam- 
mation, set up in the vessels of the fibro-cartilage ; whereby 
hypertrophy, or — in such an ossific diathesis as the horse species 
is known to possess — ossification, is produced. Any violence or 
injury to bone, or appendage to bone, it is notorious enough, 
is in horses especially apt to be followed by exostosis ; and if the 
hurt be to a joint or in the vicinity of one, by anchylosis, par- 
tial or complete, as well : so prone is the economy of the horse 
to what medical men call ossific inflammation. Commonly, we 
believe, this increased or inflammatory action originates in, and 
for a time is confined to, the substance of the fibro-cartilage inter- 
posed between the cannon and splint bones : subsequently, in many 
instances, the periosteum partakes of the same morbid or hyper- 
trophic action ; and the consequence is, tumidity and acquired sen- 
sibility of that membrane, in which condition, should it be put on 
the stretch by the formation of tumour (splint) underneath it, pain 
and lameness result. This is precisely the same thing that happens 
in nodes in the human subject, and it was the theory upon it that led 
to the division of the stretched periosteum for the relief of pain, 
whence the application of periosteotomy for the relief of lameness 
in splint. It is not, however, in every instance that the osseous 
deposition which commences in the fibro-cartilage extends beyond 
