knees, and shrinking of the shoulders. It also prevents the nails striking the ground while the foot is sensitive from shoeing." ' We may conscientiously doubt the correctness of some of these statements, others are palpable absurdities, while others again are so obscure as to puzzle us. In the first place, 'cold-shoeing,' as it has been termed, was, so far as I can ascertain, the only method employed in this country and on the continent before the 16th century; so that if our researches into the antiquity of shoeing prove anything, they prove that a patent was scarcely needed to make a monopoly of this method in the middle of the 19th century. We have also shown that, in the opinion of the highest veterinary authorities, it is impossible to shoe a horse so well in this way as by fitting the hot shoes to the hoofs. This is known to every one who has had any experience of horses or horse-shoeing; and the injury supposed to be caused by the judicious employment of this means of adjusting the shoe is purely imaginary, and the result of inexperience. The horn has no vitality, being inorganic.
This subject has often been discussed, but not, as we have seen recently, as it has been definitely decided that there was no foundation for the blame attached to hot-shoeing—as it may, though inappropriately, be termed. As horse-owners may, however, be misled by the statement that fitting the shoe to the hoof while warm injures and weakens the horn, it may be as well to assert that the very opposite is the result, and that the method recommended by Mr Goodenough is really the one that injures and weakens the horn. We have already given some
