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HORSES AND ROADS

persevere for half-a-dozen years, until they were able to establish generally in their stables, under difficulties, a system which their good sense, in the first place, and the experience they gradually gained, in the second, told them was highly economical for them and comfortable for their horses. It is not every farmer that owns forty horses; but in these days of co-operation nothing could be easier than for several farmers to agree among themselves to patronise jointly the first forge in each district, the owner of which would consent to meet their views. Let them, in fact, strike against the farriers, or make a lock-out. It only wants union among themselves, but they must first be converted from their own grooviness in respect to horse shoeing.

The Lincolnshire farmers were obliged, only in November last, to form a society for the suppression of the administration of poisonous drugs by their servants to their horses; one of them stating at the first meeting that, first and last, he had lost over thirty horses through this odious, but almost universal, practice. Perhaps these same gentlemen would excuse the suggestion that at their meetings shoeing might also be profitably discussed.

A remarkable discussion on shoeing, the heads of which may be appropriately introduced here, took place at the meeting of the Massachusetts Board of Agriculture in. 1878. Mr. Russell started by stating that the safest way was to let the hind feet be bare, and to shoe the fore feet with tips, or crescents of iron, that only cover the toe. Dr. Hunt, curiously