740 
THE FROG PRESSURE FALLACY. 
made to flourish with more strength here than in its native soil. 
Henceforward all the burden of the Professor’s song, in print, in 
patents, in lectures, and in colloquy, was, frog pressure, pressure 
on the frog, frog pressure. Though coming to the College avow- 
edly “ to learn and not to teach,” scarcely a year had elapsed ere 
his dogma was established and the edict gone forth, that primary 
frog pressure was the invaluable panacea for all the evils of shoeing. 
At first, Mr. C. began by recommending Lafosse’s shoe, three 
times as thick at the toe as at the heel, to be used on the fore feet 
of all horses. It is true that some of his past admirers did afflrm 
the idea to have been conceived by the Professor, per se; that he 
was no copyist, but an original discoverer : however this may be, 
he quickly surpassed the French master in frog- squeezing propen- 
sities; for, not content with the thin-heeled shoe, which brought the 
pasterns down and bumped frogs enough in all conscience, he con- 
trived a patent artificial frog to maintain constant pressure in the 
stable, and published a pamphlet in illustration of its imputed 
merits. But this was not all: at various times afterwards he pro- 
duced and obtained patents for several different iron devices, having 
for their primary object a most outrageous and unnatural degree 
of pressure on this flexible and yielding organ. With specious 
language and phrases did he propound to each new batch of inex- 
perienced pupils his fallacious theory, that pressure on the frog 
was the true means of preventing contraction, and the proper 
object of good shoeing. To doubt or deny this dogma would have 
been, in their cases, to hazard rejection; and thus he proceeded 
without fear of contradiction or challenge. No system ever had 
better auspices or a fairer trial than this. But, unconvinced by its 
failure even in the forges to which he sold the privilege of using 
the patent apparatus, and uncorrected by adequate censure, time 
passed on in continued error, and found him, at the end of thirty 
years, as inveterate a frog-squeezer as ever. 
Thus he annually has confused the subject in a number of tedi- 
ous lectures on the horny, and (as he has called it) the fatty frog ; 
labouring to prove that, being a prominent part, it is destined by 
nature to act as a wedge to prevent the horses slipping, and that, 
by its upward pressure, it should expand the posterior parts of the 
foot. 
Was there ever such perverted physiology? The horny frog is 
an elastic yielding body, receding within the hoof, and unfitted for 
receiving primary pressure, being formed of a series of small arches 
evidently designed and constructed to avert the too violent effects 
of accidental encounter with the ground ; but it is most admirably 
adapted for its real purpose, that of permitting the moderate expan- 
sion of the wall of the hoof, and restraining its undue action. 
