Incipient Unsoundness.

Incipient Unsoundness.

Foot, showing shoe and frog.

It is almost impossible to find a horse perfectly sound in his feet, unless one looks (strange as it may seem) into the stables of the Third Avenue Railroad Company, or those of Adams' Express, or Dodd's Transfer Company, or into some of the other stables where our shoe and system are in faithful use; we will therefore call attention to such a case as will be generally presented at the forge: A good young horse, shod for several years upon the common plan, and in the early stages of contraction. We find he has on wide-web shoes, weighing about twenty ounces each; these may be smooth in front and calked behind; they bear upon the sole and heel. In place of a frog, we discover a point of hard, shrunken, cracked substance, neither frog nor sole. We cut the clenches and take off the relic of ignorance and barbarism, throwing it with hearty good-will into the only place fit to receive it the pile of scrap-iron. We examine carefully to see that no stub of nail is left in. The heels will be found long and hard. Our object being frog-pressure, to get the vivifying action of this tactile organ upon the ground, we pare down the whole wall; we soon come to signs of a corn perhaps a drop of blood starts; but as we do not intend to put the weight upon the heels, we are not alarmed. Having cut all we can from the heels and still finding that the frog, when the shoe is laid on, can not touch the ground, we knock down the last two calks and draw the heel of the shoe thin; this must give us a bearing upon the frog and the sound part of the foot. We use the lightest shoe, truly fitted with the rasp, not burned on. The horse should then be worked regularly, and he will experience at once the benefit of a return to "first principles" and natural action.

Foot, with shell removed.