152 
A. ZUNDEL. 
the shoe, and wider than the ordinary bar shoe. The bar is 
notched on each side, and through each notch runs a thread or 
vice which holds a movable clip, which is made to rest on the 
inside of the bars, which are first properly thinned out. By a 
motion of the clip through the thread, the heels are dilated 
slowly and by degrees. This shoe, however, is very expensive, 
difficult to make, and easily put out of order. 
In all these methods of dilatation the shoe has to be made of 
several pieces, and in this condition is found a constant cause of 
weakness and of rapid deterioration, for which reason they are 
not very practicable. It is not so with the system used by De¬ 
fays, Sr., by which the shoe, besides containing the essential ele¬ 
ments of the desired mechanical dilatation, is left entire to fulfil 
the functions of the ordinary shoe, as well. That which character¬ 
izes Defays’ method, who had used it in 1829, but which was 
made known only in later years, is that the shoe itself, which, by 
its ductility in action, becomes the agent of the dilatation of the 
hoof, becomes also, by its natural tenacity, the obstacle to the re¬ 
turn of the foot to its former contracted condition, when once it 
has yielded to the outward motion which it has acquired. Defays 
uses an ordinary shoe, thick and narrow, and then further nar¬ 
rowed at the toe, if it is to be used on a foot regularly contracted. 
When it is thus affected, at five or six centimetres of the heels; if 
the contraction exists at the quarters, at the end of each branch. 
This shoe carries on the inside border a strong, resisting clip, 
made at right angles, to rest on the internal border of the wall of 
the heels. The shoe is flat, grooved like an English shoe, with 
nail holes slightly turned inwards; the last nail hole made as far 
as possible from the heels. It is made of the best quality of iron, 
in order to resist, when cold, the greatest amount of forced spread¬ 
ing by the dilator: it is the expansive slipper of Defays {^pantoujie 
expansive). 
The foot upon which this slipper is to be fixed must have both 
heels pared evenly, the sole and the bars pared down to a spring, 
and the hoof round the frog, on each side, thinned down as much 
as can be borne. Then, the shoe, flattened and without curvature 
on its faces—resting, therefore, on a strictly horizontal plane—is 
