THE ETIQUETTE OF VETERINARY AUTHORSHIP. 915 
■what is original. He must know that the great mass of our 
information is at least professional, if not even public pro¬ 
perty, and that it is unreasonable for any author to claim 
credit for what belongs to all—unless, indeed, Mr. Fleming 
means to say, that no one is entitled to write on horse-shoeing 
but himself, and that no one, professional or otherwise, is 
to be allowed to publish his ideas upon the subject and to 
bring out distinctions without being liable to a charge of 
plagiarism, which seems to be what Mr. Fleming’s complaint 
points to. 
Mr. Fleming not only accuses me in general terms of 
abstracting his ideas, but even of giving “ literally” portions of 
his works. Like most members of the profession, I am 
quite familiar with Mr. Fleming's writings on horse-shoeing, 
and am of opinion that he has given a very full and accurate 
account of what has been Avritten on the subject up to the 
date of his publications, but I am nevertheless not aware that 
they contain any original matter. 
As to the second accusation, that I have adopted Mr, 
Thacker's shoe without acknowledgment, I may state that, 
until I saw Mr. Fleming’s letter, 1 had forgotten there was 
a shoe termed Thacker's shoe, although I had read the 
manuscript of Mr. Fleming’s essay in 1870. Since, however, 
my attention has been drawn to it by Mr. Fleming’s letter, I 
have read his printed description of this shoe, and examined 
the plates in pages 76 and 77 of his essay on f Practical Horse- 
Shoeing,’ but have failed to recognise its identity with 
mine; indeed, the one is as different as possible from the 
other. My shoe is simply a tooled concave ground-sur¬ 
face shoe, with narrower heels than ordinary, fullered and 
holed in the ordinary way, with the exception that the 
fullering is not carried to the end of the heel. Mr. 
Thacker’s shoe is also concave on the ground surface and 
narrow at the heels, but very wide in the web at the toe, 
which is turned up (Frenchified). It also has a clip at each side 
of the toe, four nails only, and those stamped in the middle of 
the web of the shoe, so that unless the foot were good and 
strong it would be dangerous to put such a shoe on. Mr. 
Thacker's shoe is, in fact, a modified French shoe, and a very 
bad modification for general purposes ; but further, the shoe 
is not originally Mr. Thacker’s, and if the reader will refer 
to Mr. Fleming’s essay, page 77, he will find the concluding 
portion of his description of the Thacker shoe to be as fol¬ 
lows :— tff It may be mentioned that, with the exception of 
“ the two side clips at the toe, this shoe is nearly identical in 
“ shape with that recommended by Col. Fitzwygram in his 
