NEUltOTOMY. 
main trunk above the division, and in both cases branches from 
the ulnar nerve preserve the sensibility of the integument below 
the fetlock, and almost or quite to the coronet, thus giving timely 
notice of the slightest contact of the toe with the ground, and 
producing that instantaneous adjustment of muscular action 
which will neutralize the dreaded concussion. 
The altered Action continued. — How stands the actual fact? 
There is altered action — in some cases to such a degree as to 
render the horse unpleasant and unsafe as a hackney or a hunter — 
at other times so modified by the circumstances which have been 
mentioned as scarcely to lessen the value of the horse in either 
character. Mr. Rickwood mentions a horse that for six years 
after the operation had been used as a hackney; and another, 
that for many years had been regularly hunted, and, eleven years 
after the excision of the nerve, was still sound in his action. Do 
not, however, misunderstand me. I am no strenuous advocate 
for the operation on hackneys or hunters, intended afterwards 
to be used as such. I should not like habitually to ride a horse 
on which neurotomy had been performed ; and most certainly 
I should hesitate not a little ere I took a difficult or daring leap 
on a hunter that had in this way been under the veterinary 
surgeon’s hands. So far as 1 had power, 1 would confine my own 
practice of neurotomy to horses of more or less speedy draught. 
There would be no danger with them ; and in the majority of 
instances the performance of the operation could not be detected 
in their manner of going. I acknowledge impairment of action, 
but that impairment has been much exaggerated. 
Curious Application of Neurotomy. — 1 well remember, some 
eighteen or twenty years ago, a practitioner in town who ob- 
tained considerable celebrity, and, I dare say, remuneration too, 
for curing horses with ring-bone and ossified cartilages. He did 
not profess much to reduce the size of the osseous tumour; but 
he almost invariably sent his patients home free from lameness, 
and the majority of them remained sound as long as they lived. 
He professed simply to blister and fire them ; but he maintained 
that there was as much virtue in his ointment as in that so 
wonderfully extolled by Lieutenant James at the present day. 
There was, most assuredly, nothing in the action of the horse 
which would lead to the suspicion that the practitioner had done 
more than to blister and to fire. At length, however, some rival 
vet. who was gravelled that a horse should be restored to useful- 
ness which he had condemned to the knacker’s yard, discovered a 
neat incision in one of the lines produced by the iron ; and, on 
closer examination, detected that the horse had been nerved. 
I remember that I got a good bullying, and I did not know 
