VETERINARY DENTISTRY. 
145 
higher than the rest hurt him by pricking his flesh or tongue, 
and make him give over eating. This inconvenience is of no 
great consequence, yet it puzzles several persons when they 
see a horse forsake his meat without any manifest cause, and 
pine away when there is no apparent defect either in his eyes 
or his hair, and even when he is otherwise brisk and lively. 
You must handle his grinders, and if you feel the points of 
them through his lips, take a sort of upset of iron, which far¬ 
riers commonly use, and setting his mouth open these points 
will appear, which you may break off with a googe, an instru¬ 
ment with which every farrier is furnished ; but you must 
beware lest by striking heedlessly on the googe, a good 
tooth, or even the whole jaw, may be loosened. To prevent 
this inconvenience, which may easily happen, instead of using 
the googe, you may make the horse champ on a great file 
used by locksmiths, which will break off the over-grown 
points if they are not too big; but he must chaw the file a 
quarter of an hour on both sides. 
“ 1 once had a mule one of whose nether grinders grew to a 
prodigious length. It happened that the upper tooth direct¬ 
ly opposite to it fell out, and that below grew up into the 
void space, and by degrees pierced the roof of his mouth 
about the thickness of one’s fingers, which tormented him 
greatly when he drunk. I have related this example as an 
extraordinary case to show that when once the teeth exceed 
their due measure and are not daily worn by chewing, they 
may grow to an extraordinary length, and even cut the roof 
of the mouth. I saw an old horse, one of whose great teeth 
below was a whole finger’s breadth longer than the rest of 
his grinders. We were obliged to cast him with a great deal 
of trouble before we could break it off with a googe, and his 
jaw was so loosened by the violence of the operation that he 
could not eat without much pain for fifteen days after; but 
at length he recovered and fed heartily, which he could not 
do before that monstrous tooth was broken.” 
This short chapter, written nearly three hundred years 
ago, contains all that many veterinarians of to-day know of 
dental surgery. From the time this work was written, I 
