REVIEW. 
87 
structure, added to the natural elastic property possessed by the 
substance of the horn itself; the only one, according to 
M. Bouley, recognised by Lafosse. When people talk about 
the elasticity of the hoof, it is very essential that this difference 
should be understood. 
Freeman, who was a friend and “ fellow labourer ” of Sir 
Sydney Meadows, “ in the riding-house,” had no legitimate 
apology for writing on such a subject as " the Mechanism of the 
Horse’s Foot,” save the one urged by the Earl of Pembroke, 
when he introduced “ Shoeing ” into his “ Treatise on Military 
Equitation which was, that he considered that any gentleman 
who let his farrier, groom, or coachman pretend to talk to him 
about “ the nature of the feet, the seat of lamenesses, sick¬ 
nesses, and their causes, might be certain to find himself very 
shortly, and very absurdly, quite on foot ” himself; for which 
reason it was, he urges in his Preface, “ I was led to those 
researches on the anatomical construction of the foot, from 
having, by constant attention for some years past, carefully 
observed the various exertions of which the limbs of the horse 
are capable; and from having noticed, in consequence of frequent 
conversations with my late much regretted master in horseman¬ 
ship, Sir Sidney Meadows, the necessity there is for preserving 
the elasticity of the heels, for those purposes.” — Preface, 
p. viii. 
Freeman descried nothing in the apparatus of the laminae, 
save that the “ villous surface,” in which the organic laminae 
terminate, “ forms the organ of touch” But in the next page 
(13), where he comes to describe the " walls of the hoof, from 
the coronet downwards,” he observes,— “ These returns, in¬ 
wards and forwards, take the name of bars or binders. They 
inclose the extremities of the cartilages, in the same wav as the 
quarters cover the heels, and equally admit of expansion and 
contraction ; so that when a horse is in full gallop, there is a 
repeated alternation of these opposite actions. For when his 
feet strike the ground, the elasticity of the bars aids the pressure 
of the bones in the expansion of the heels, which are again 
immediately contracted by the quarters the moment the heels 
are in the air again.” Not that Freeman had no notion of 
elasticity or yielding in the substance of the laminee; for, at 
* Third Edit., 1778. 
