104 A VISIT TO THE GREAT EXHIBITION. 
levelly nailed upon the feet, and frequently with two lateral clips 
driven into the crust, the toe of which is afterwards rasped. 
From such shoeing the following results are inevitable, 
indeed anticipated :—The foot grows dry and hard and narrow, 
and makes rapid progress towards contraction ; the aplomb 
becomes false, and at length lameness and disease of foot are 
engendered with deplorable frequency, for which the farrier 
neither knows, nor is he able to employ, any remedy. On the 
other hand, with French shoeing such accidents become but the 
exception. This is a notorious fact, patent to the whole world ; 
and yet the English, or the majority of them at least, refuse 
to entertain it, under the pretext that, though our plan of shoeing 
may answer very well for us, it is worth nothing to them; at 
least, such was Mr. Field’s answer to my inquiries on' the 
subject, without, as I thought, assigning any satisfactory reason : 
shewing, when all comes to be reckoned up, that this amounts 
to neither more nor less than purely a piece of that national 
pride to which the English are so prone, and especially when 
any comparison with us, French, to whom they will on no 
account confess inferiority, becomes the question at issue. But 
judgment is declared. On this, as on many other questions 
which the Exhibition has cleared up, France has carried off the 
prize without contest; not in the Crystal Palace, to which she 
did not send so much as the head of a horsenail, but at home, 
within the improved forges of her principal towns, wherein 
scientific farriery, aided by manual skill, has become a finished 
art. And if there be, at the present day, any horse proprietors, 
any “gentlemen riders ,” or English veterinarians, who refuse 
their belief to evidence so clear and which is substantiated by 
several of their countrymen, let them avow the only truthful 
reason for refusing to subscribe to that in opposition to which 
the best interest of horses, viz., the healthy practice of our art, 
absolutely can discover nothing to urge. 
Journal des Vettrinaires, Toulouse 7bre,Qbre, et 9 bre, 1851. 
