ON COFFIN-JOINT LAMENESS. 
619 
was the advice of our favourite author Virgil; and lie may 
be justly allowed to have had some practical knowledge on the 
subject, as his first visit to Rome procured for him an ap¬ 
pointment in the royal stables, in consequence of his skill in 
the cure of diseases incidental to horses ; and his poems, which 
are justly esteemed the most finished pieces of antiquity, shew 
how thoroughly he understood the science of husbandry and 
agriculture, the different properties of animals, the secrets of 
arts and sciences, and of nature itself. In short, his knowledge 
seems to have had no other bounds than those of universal 
nature. 
[To be continued.] 
ON COFFIN-JOINT LAMENESS, AND THE 
OPERATION OF NEUROTOMY. 
By Mr. Moorcroft. 
[Extracted from the Calcutta Journal.] 
To the Editor of the “ Calcutta Journal." 
Calcutta, March 26lh, 1819. 
Sir, —With reference to your paper of the 23d instant (columns 
803-4), noticing as discovered by Mr. Sewell, within about the 
last eighteen months, a cure for a lameness in horses, commonly 
called Coffin-Joint Lameness, I beg leave to observe, that the 
mode of treatment alluded to, so far from being a discovery of 
the last eighteen months, was practised by me about eighteen 
years ago. 
About twenty years ago I was sedulously engaged in endea¬ 
vouring to detect the causes of the lamenesses in the fore feet of 
the horses in England. This enquiry was pressed upon me by 
their frequency; by my insufficiency to afford permanent relief in 
many instances; and by the vast loss resulting from horses being 
reduced, through permanent lameness, often to one-third of their 
first value. For a longtime previous to this period it had been 
fashionable to attribute most lamenesses in the fore limb of the 
horse (of which the causes w ere not glaringly obvious in altera¬ 
tion from natural form) to some disease in the shoulder, imper¬ 
fectly understood: but it was become fashionable at that time to 
impute the same kinds of lameness as generally to a contracted 
condition of the foot; and, in truth, I was more instrumental in 
generalizing this assumption of cause than consisted with subse¬ 
quent experience, for this experience shewed that, although the 
