EDITORIAL OBSERVATIONS. 
291 
—a country where the custom of using entire horses brings 
veterinary practitioners to be better acquainted with hernia 
and castration than our own custom of early emasculation ad¬ 
mits of our being—has imparted some practical remarks of a 
character we cannot fail to profit by; while the results of thirty 
years’ practice in the art of shoeing, coming from two of the 
oldest and most experienced veterinary surgeons in the queen’s 
service, promise too rare and valuable information to be suf¬ 
fered in our hands to pass without seizing the opportunity of 
connecting therewith a few observations of our own. 
Considering how recently we have had occasion to examine 
into that assumed and generally admitted property of the hoof, 
elasticity , upon the nature and extent of which some of the 
knottiest points in shoeing depend for their solution, we are, in 
a measure, prepared for the coup cl'ceil we are about to take of 
shoeing in general. The remark we shall set out .with may 
surprise some of our readers; nevertheless, we boldly and 
broadly assert, that shoeing, as practised at the present day at 
our forges, both in town and country, with hardly an exception, 
is to our mind in its application faulty. The shoe we have for 
many years been in the habit of using is the very reverse of 
the shoe in public or common use. Turn the ordinary fore¬ 
shoe upside down, make the foot-surface the ground-surface, 
and vice ■ versa, and it becomes, with one or two minor dif¬ 
ferences, the shoe we recommend and adopt. The advantages 
it possesses in our eyes over the shoe in general use, are—• 
1st, That it bears the closest resemblance, in being dished , to 
the concave form of the sole and the tread of the natural hoof— 
to the body, in fact, it is designed to protect. 2dly, In con¬ 
sequence of the interspace between the sole and the shoe being 
nothing like what is left in ordinary shoeing, suction from the 
ground is in that degree diminished, whereby two-thirds, or 
even less, of the number of nails ordinarily employed, suffice 
for retaining the shoe on the foot. 3dly, That from the ex¬ 
tended surface of bearing it has against the wall of the hoof, 
and part of the sole as well, it becomes an easier shoe for the 
horse to wear; while the concavity which the shoe presents 
inferiorly, corresponding to the concavity of the sole, is calcu¬ 
lated to embrace or grasp such convex irregularities as roads in 
general consist of, and thus renders the foot a great deal less 
likely to slip—from its becoming a sort of safety shoe —than 
with the shoe in common use. Such is the shaped shoe used 
by Mr. Hallen and Mr. Charles Percivall, besides some other 
veterinarians we could name; and such, in our opinion, is the 
shoe eminently adapted, chiefly for the reasons we have given, 
for all ordinary purposes. 
But it will, probably, be objected to this—which usually 
