veterinary surgeon. But, perhaps, he was shoeing to order.
It has been well said that ‘ladies are not bigger slaves to fashion than are modern horse owners.’
In a paper dedicated to agriculturists it has been maintained that horseshoes are an absolute necessity, but that ‘the difficulty in riding or driving through the London streets arises from the variety of pavements in use. From Westminster to the Bank, horses have to travel over macadam, asphalte, wood, and granite. The shoe adapted for traffic on one kind of pavement ill suits another.’ But is it so? Ask Mr. Smither. ‘If we had a uniform kind of pavement, a shoe for universal (?) use would be quickly invented. The ingenuity of man would devise horseshoes to travel over glass, were glass the only pavement in use.’ This is an insult to the common sense of its readers. It has been widely, and for a long time, proved that the naked foot of the horse is as much at home on one kind of hard road as on another, and can pass over all of them alternately without wearing out, or inconveniencing the horse, and that on none of them will he slip, or on wet grass either.
In Mexico, Yucatan, Honduras (both British and Spanish), Guatemala, San Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, the United States of Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, and Brazil, horses, mules, and donkeys are worked over every description of hard roads, most of them exceedingly rough, carrying very heavy packs from the back country
