466 NOTES ON THE HISTORY OF HORSE-SHOEING. 
that travellers take a provision of them on a journey, and poor 
people have them ready made for sale at every station. In ancient 
Persia, where the breeds of gray, dun, and bay races, are all hard- 
hoofed, the use of horses in the sandy districts did not apparently 
require much attention to the abrasion of the horn; but in the lofty 
mountain chains, running from north to south, raising the great 
central plateau to 4000 feet above the level of the sea, all the 
passes and parts of the higher surface are exceedingly stony and 
hurtful to the edges and frog of the foot. In rapid and long-con¬ 
tinued marches, the hardest-hoofed animals become crippled, and 
in history we find more than one instance, where military expedi¬ 
tions were arrested in their progress until the horses had time to 
recover and restore their hoofs. These occurred chiefly when great 
operations of cavalry were directed by foreign commanders, who 
trusted to their energy for surmounting obstacles which more 
enervated native warriors believed to be impracticable. Thus 
Alexander the Great, according to Diodorus, and Mithridates, at 
the siege of Cyzicus, were both thwarted and delayed, while the 
Persians, under Darius, and the Parthians, do not appear to have 
been equally distressed under similar circumstances. From the 
summits of central Asia, the direct line towards the west, to the 
Bosphorus, is replete with lofty and rugged chains, which colonists 
or moving armies in these directions have to traverse. To the 
north of the Ox us and the Caspian the space is almost entirely 
alluvial and plain, there being only towards the west a succession 
of great rivers to cross, and severe cold to encounter. On the 
south of the Persian plateau, and in part across it, when the 
Suleimanee range is surmounted, the difficulties are more serious, 
from the scarcity of water and the intensity of the sun, which 
scorches up the vegetation important to cattle, though, as neither 
present long enduring causes of injury to the hoofs of horses, it 
seems most probable that ingenuity to protect them w T as not set at 
work on either of these great lines of progress, where, on the one 
hand, many of the nations of western Europe, and in later ages 
Tartars, have passed in great numbers, or where the southern 
nations have once travelled westward to Arabia, and by which 
Alexander himself led his own army when he returned from the 
Indus. We must, therefore, look for the remedial inventions for 
the protection to horses’ hoofs to the localities where they were 
most wanted. 
Setting aside the pretensions of Chinese ingenuity, the claim 
might be urged in favour of the Persians, on the ground of the 
horseshoe distinctly marked on the sole of a satrap’s charger, in the 
Mosaic picture at Pompeii, supposed to represent the defeat of 
Darius by Alexander. But as this fact appears to rest, at present, 
