VETERINARY JURISPRUDENCE. 63 
was trying the horse as a riding-horse. Rode him two or three 
times. He is in the habit of buying and selling horses. 
Mr. W. Mavor is frequently employed by Lord Poltimore to 
examine horses for him. He examined this horse for him on the 
16th of June — he examined it particularly carefully — he examined 
the feet well. The cartilages and coronets were perfectly good ; 
his paces were good, high, and elastic; he was not in the least 
degree lame : there was nothing to make him believe that he was 
unsound. The horse was not purchased on account of his age : 
he was an aged horse, and there might be some little danger at- 
tending the operation of castration : for this reason, and for this 
only, he was not bought. 
The horse was perfectly sound. He had him two or three days 
in his stables. He saw the horse again on the 3d of August : he 
was then very lame in the left fore leg ; there was recent splent on 
the inside of the leg, and near to the knee. The horse flinched, 
and threw his leg up the moment pressure was applied to the splent. 
He traces the lameness to this splent, and to this alone. The horse 
was under his care from this time until the 20th. There was great 
inflammation under the knee. Some lameness remained when he 
sent the horse away on the 20th. 
He saw him for the last time on the 7th of October. The horse 
was not lame then — not in the slightest degree : he was decidedly 
not lame in his feet : there was no ossification of the coronet : he 
examined him particularly on this point. There was not the slight- 
est ossification ; they were the most elastic, pliable cartilages he 
ever saw in his life. It was the perfect natural elasticity of the 
parts. 
There was on the near hock a slight malformation, not amounting 
to disease, and not interfering with the action of the horse in the 
slightest degree. There are several bones which go to form the hock : 
there are two layers of them, flat and somewhat thin. This enlarge- 
ment was on the outside of one of them, causing a little projection, 
which might be both seen and felt. It was just such a projection 
as would be caused by a portion of a walnut-shell being placed on 
any body. It was on the external surface of one of the small bones 
of the hock, and therefore did not interfere with the action or use of 
the joint*. 
* The bones of the hock of a horse were here introduced ; it was the speci- 
men which Mr. Serjeant Bompas had referred to but not produced in his ex- 
amination of Mr. Youatt. There was a slight projection of one of the small 
bones of the lower layer : it was evidently one of the cuneiform bones ; but 
at the distance at which he sat, he could not determine which : and there 
was a long oval projection in an horizontal direction, giving erroneously the 
idea that this bone, in some state of softness, had been flattened, and a por- 
tion of it pressed outward by the superincumbent weight. 
