THE HOOF AND ITS CULTURE. 
353 
and diseases can be instantly arrested and be made to grad¬ 
ually vanish just as they came, being due far more to after¬ 
birth environment and mismanagement of the hoofs than to 
heredity. This is so certain that in nearly every case a cure 
can be warranted. The same may be said of navicular dis¬ 
ease and the various forms of laminitis, side-bones, and en¬ 
larged cartilages. They are entirely curable if taken in time, 
even to an advanced stage ; the age of the animal, the length 
of time the defects have existed, demanding merely more time 
for readjustment and repair. Springhalt, paddling, interfer¬ 
ing, overreaching, hitching, pacing, traveling one-sided, trip¬ 
ping, stumbling, etc., all depend upon hoof depravity. So- 
called scratches, scurfy and horny eruptions on the legs, also 
depend on the disturbed state of the skin of the pasterns and 
ankles from irritation, interrupted circulation and embarrassed 
functions, caused by a contracted or unthrifty hoof, the re¬ 
sult being frequently the transplanting of the horn and hair 
elements, as well as cutaneous and sub-cutaneous tissues; all 
these again become normal after the hoof is properly opened 
up. Tissue metamorphosis in the soliped, I predict, will yet 
become a subject of the highest interest to the student of 
comparative medicine; first, on account of a difference from or- 
thopoedics in human surgery; and second, the factsuch changes 
are probably as much physiological as pathological, the recti¬ 
fication of imperfect horse’s limbs being very different from 
what is required in human limbs. 
The tenacity with which veterinary surgeons will adhere 
to old mysterious notions and traditions even after the fail¬ 
ures and disappointments that have ever attended their prac¬ 
tice, of this branch of the profession, and for so many years, 
can only be explained by characterizing their whole system 
of treatment as “ temporizing expedients,” mostly tricks and 
patchwork; that their patience was not exhausted long ago, 
nor their veterinary genius stimulated, is hardly creditable 
either to their ingenuity or their enterprise. Medical men, 
some of them eminent, to whom these features of the subject 
(the aetiology of tissue changes) have been submitted, pro¬ 
nounce them to be in entire harmony with sound medical 
