Hippodonomia, or the true structure, laws, and economy, of the horse's foot: also podophthora, or a ruinous defect in the principle of the common shoe detected ... with a proposition for a new principle of shoeing / [Bracy Clark].

  • Clark, Bracy, 1771-1860
Date:
1829
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hippodonomia, or the true structure, laws, and economy, of the horse's foot: also podophthora, or a ruinous defect in the principle of the common shoe detected ... with a proposition for a new principle of shoeing / [Bracy Clark]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    / 124 externally to the eye. It protects the coffin joint and strengthens it in a remarkable manner from the disorder which a lateral thrust of the coronet bone would occasion it. The hoof itself also is in a degree elastic, bending, and accommodating itself to the more violent motions and distortions of the foot, easing thus the interior parts, which otherwise would be bruised and suffer from resistance. A still more important office remains to be exposed if we can suc- ceed in making it intelligible,—that of supplying the coffin-bone with a considerable share of its means of motion in the hoof; for it is to be remarked, that as the coffin-bone is obliged to describe in its descent under strong pressure from the limb and body, a small portion or segment of a circle, at its back parts, round its centre of motion, or rather its more fixed parts, (for there is no part of it wholly fixed,) towards the front of the foot; so this could not have been so well accomplished had the bone itself been fixed at its upper part to the keraphyllous processes in front of the hoof, these being too incon- siderable to afford in that part of the bone the extent of motion re- quired, but by the intervention of an elastic cartilage between the bone and the internal surface of the hoof which is carrying the pro- cesses ; the bone is thereby acquiring a greater liberty for action, and the movement of its upper parts, to perform the necessary depression. Another useful office appears when we consider the horse in violent action ; the pastern and coronet bones are then forcibly drawn from their backward position, over the front of the hoof before the foot quits the ground, and consequently will force these posterior parts backwards and downwards with great power, and sink and depress them very much, but which are prevented from disunion and rup- ture, by being contained within the encircling hoof, and the elastic yielding body of these cartilages and the furch, will aid in restoring them to their first position, the horn furch also assisting—and where the cartilage again would be inconvenient or unnecessary, there we find the reticulum processigerum is supplying its place. A perpetual shoe would soon be intolerable, but for the nature of