As a railway carriage is constructed on springs to soften all ordinary jolts, and with buffers to alleviate any violent concussion;—as the human mind is gifted with a buoyancy which enables it cheerfully to meet any trifling vexation, and with sentiments of religion which maintain its serenity under the severest afflictions, so do the pastern above a horse's foot and the frog beneath it protect the body of the animal from the continual slight concussions and occasional severe ones to which, in ordinary and extraordinary exertions, it is liable to be subjected.
The pastern, like the instep of those Spanish women whose heels in walking scarcely touch the ground, gives grace and elasticity to every step; indeed, in the walk, trot, canter, and gallop of a horse we clearly see the spring of his pasterns softening the movements of their own creation.
But while the career of the body is thus rendered115 safe and delightful, the interior mechanism of the foot is protected by one of those simple, beautiful, mechanical arrangements which in every direction demonstrate to us the superintending providence of an Almighty Power.
If the sole, front, sides, and back of a hunter's foot had been created as solid and as inelastic as the gold or silver case of what is called a hunting watch, the interior of the former, like that of the latter, would receive material damage from a heavy blow against the ground.
The coating, however, of hard horn or armour which shields the front and sides of the sensitive foot from any obstacle in its course, does not equally extend to that portion of it in the rear, out of harm's way, called the heels, beneath which we find on examination a triangular cushion of an Indiarubber-like composition, which, on concussion, or even by compression, acting as a wedge, forces the heels that contain it, outwards.
By this beautiful arrangement, when a hunter with his front legs extended, jumping over a broad fence, lands on a hard macadamised road upon his two fore-feet, the heels which receive the greater portion of the concussion are expanded by it in exact proportion to the weight of the bodies of the horse and rider, and the violence of the blow being thus alleviated, the sensitive mechanism of the foot is shielded from injury.116 And yet, strange to say, simply by the act of shoeing, this merciful protection in every country in the world is, generally speaking, destroyed!
If a mischievous or ignorant clown were to drive a nail through a chronometer, he would only destroy an insensible and inanimate work of art; but when a man of wealth, intelligence, and science—the proprietor of a valuable horse, on whose safe going his comfort, and occasionally his life depends—deliberately nails to the poor creature's living, expansible feet four obdurate, inexpansible iron shoes, he is really guilty of an act of barbarity and barbarism which would scarcely be expected from a savage, for besides instantly impeding the expansive apparatus of the foot, he effectually stops its growth.
Under this treatment the young horse, by day and by night, not only lives in shoes which, though they may not hurt him very much in the stable, always pinch him "in his utmost need," or rather speed; but, like a Chinese lady, he outgrows his own feet, until, on attaining his full size, it is discovered that his body, which, like that of Dives, his master, has always worn fine clothing, and has fared sumptuously every day, has nothing but a set of colt's feet with contracted heels t............