271 
THE HORSE’S FOOT. 
to drop down lower, the tissues are easily lacerated and bruised in 
its displacement at the time the foot rests on the ground. 
The most serious causes of corns arise from shoeing, 
which not only sometimes gives to the hoof a shape predisposing 
to that disease, but also very often is a determining cause itself 
of these injuries. “ As long,” says Hartmann, “as horses will 
have corns, horse-shoeing can not pass as an art, and their too 
frequent presence is an evident proof of our imperfect means of 
protection to the hoof.” Without shoeing there would be no 
corns, and it is in its irrational methods that the true causes of 
these accidents originate. It is by the greater or less frequency 
of corns that one may judge of the state of that art in a country. 
The faults are found, 1st, in the manner in which the foot is 
pared, or in the shape which it receives ; 2d, in the fitting of the 
shoe; 3d, in its application. In paring the foot, the sole is often 
weakened, and thinned too much ; it does not resist the pressure, 
and, at the time of resting the foot, all the weight of the body is 
thrown upon the point of union of the sole with the wall. Ordi¬ 
narily too much has been cut away from the frog, aud this not 
resting any more on the ground, no longer resists the pressure, 
and the lowering of the branches of the sole is then extreme, as 
proved by the experiments of Leisering. The custom of cutting 
the corns, and of cutting the hoof at the heels, acts in a similar 
manner; the posterior half of the foot is weakened, and that is 
the part which must carry the greatest part of the weight. One 
needs only to compare a foot from which the slioer has removed 
much horn at the sole, frog and bars, with one in which the hoof 
has been left alone for a long time. In making a vertical and 
transverse section of the two in the middle of the frog, a little in 
front of the angles of the sole, he will see at once how weak the 
point of reunion of the sole with the wall has become, the means 
of resistance to the pressure of the weight of the body through 
the third phalanx being thus diminished, and consequently a pre¬ 
disposition to bruises created. 
The shape of the shoe also contributes to corns ; an excess of 
concavity; a shoe which from the last nail-hole is not flat to the 
heels, whose branches are too much inclined, contributes to the 
