REPLY TO MR. C. CLARK. 
309 
brought forward.* 1 As this claim-all correspondent of vours 
does not favour us with the name, or inform us who this said per¬ 
son is, or where the detached passages are to be found, we 
must, as a matter of course, take it for granted that they are not 
of any sort of importance, and I presume therefore they can 
only have appeared in some very obscure publication, and thus 
have escaped my notice. 
But I happen, on more than one occasion, to have published 
some strictures on Mr. B. Clark's pretensions to the merit and ori¬ 
ginality of the discovery of the expansion of the horse's foot, 
in the Lancet, No. 361, July 31st last; and subsequently, in 
No. 373, a complete refutation of his claim-all imported pro¬ 
digy’s attempt to prove the contrary, a step I felt particularly 
called on to take alter the review which appeared in the Lancet , 
and a re-publication of Mr. B. Clark's book, without any notice 
w hatever of Mr. Freeman's valuable labours, or giving him the 
least possible credit for his knowledge of the expansion of the 
foot; and, will you believe me, gentlemen, even after he had ad¬ 
mitted to me, in the hearing of his prodigy, that if Mr. Freeman's 
work w as authentic, he was w ell acquainted with the expansion 
of the hoof, and fully entitled to the merit of it. 
Now as I am entirely at variance with Mr. B. Clark as to the 
action of the hoof, by contending that it is not constructed like a 
bow , or the frog or bow-string, and that Mr. Freeman's descrip¬ 
tion is a true one, I have not, of course, derived my information 
from Mr. B. Clark, but from Mr. Freeman, and that many years 
ago; hut I have waited patiently until a re-publication of the 
former's work appeared, and in the mean time also taken the pre¬ 
caution of laying' a copy of Mr. Freeman’s before him, that he 
might not plead ignorance of it, w ell know ing the sale has been 
extremely limited, and that very few, even veterinary practi¬ 
tioners, had ever seen or heard of it. I will now r proceed to 
examine into Mr. Freeman's obscure notions and ill-understood 
views of the expansion of the horse's foot, as your claim-all cor¬ 
respondent has chosen to call them, and alas, for him! for with 
his own words will 1 convict him, and prove him in that situation 
he fain would have us believe he has placed Mr. Freeman,— on 
the w rong side of the post; for of all the writers with which I am 
acquainted, the late Mr. Freeman has the most clearly, truly, and 
accurately described the real action of the horse's foot; w hile, on 
the contrary, Mr. B. Clark has very frequently bogled, mystified, 
and confused, what he principally and uncandidly has been bor¬ 
rowing from others. At page 101, says Mr. Freeman,—“ If the 
foot of a cloven footed animal—a goat for instance—w ere to be 
covered with a flat piece of iron, w ith the sharpest spikes made to 
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