THE NON-EXPANSION OF HORSES’ FEET. 
By Mr. Caleb Morgan. 
[We avail ourselves of the kind hint of Mr. Morgan, and present 
our readers with his first letter on the expansion of the horses’ 
feet. In justice, however, to the subject and to our friends, 
we shall in the next number insert the reply of Mr. Clark, and 
the rejoinder. We shall, however, confine ourselves strictly to 
the question at issue—the expansion or non-expansion of the 
foot—avoiding all other matters that were incidentally referred 
to by those gentlemen.—Y."l 
Aware that most of your readers are interested in the safe¬ 
going of their horses, and that anything which can tend to eluci¬ 
date the much-agitated question of foot lameness, or be produc¬ 
tive of practical results in the shoeingor treatment of their horses’ 
feet, cannot be uninteresting to any class of the community, I 
enclose the enclosed paper for The Lancet. 
The expansive quality assigned to the foot, having led to many 
errors in these matters, I propose, first, to endeavour to clear 
away the mist which has enveloped it, and, at a future opportu¬ 
nity, to pursue the subject matter in its practical bearings, and 
to point out what I have found to be the cause and best preven¬ 
tives of foot lameness. 
On reading the November number of The Sporting Maga¬ 
zine, I was much surprised that a correspondent, who styles 
himself Nubia,” should have asserted that the foot of the 
horse expands the eighth of an inch, or more, every time it comes 
in contact with the ground. If your readers will excuse the pun, 
I really thouf^ht he must have been in 7iubibus when he hazarded 
such an assertion. I draw my inference from rather an extensive 
experience ; and, having been in the habit of continually dissecting 
feet for some years past, and most devotedly in search of facts 
and information on these matters, it is singularly unfortunate I 
never could discover this much-talked-of expansion, or opening 
and collapsing, or shutting of the foot of the horse. 
It has been too much the fashion to take this expansive qua¬ 
lity, wrongly assigned to the foot, upon trust, without submitting 
it to the test of actual experiment; and Nubia” has certainly 
not smoothed the way much for trying it, when he informs us, 
that it can be tried fairly only on the feet of horses that have 
