170 NATURAL HISTORY IN ANECDOTE. 



in his gallop, that a wheelbarrow might have been driven 

 between them. King Herod, another famous horse, which 

 was generally, though not like Eclipse uniformly, successful, is 

 chiefly celebrated for his progeny; his immediate descendants 

 having gained to their owners above two hundred thousand 

 pounds." 



The Horse's Many marvellous stories are told of the en- 

 Endurance, durance of the horse. Sir John Malcolm says, 

 "Small parties of Toorkomans, who ventured several hundred 

 miles into Persia, used both to advance and retreat at the 

 average of nearly one hundred miles a day. They train 

 their horses for these expeditions as we should do for a race, 

 and describe him when in a condition for a foray by saying 

 that his flesh is marble. When I was in Persia, a horseman 

 mounted upon a Toorkoman horse, brought a packet of letters 

 from Shiraz to Teherary, which is a distance of five hundred 

 miles, within six days." Almost equally remarkable records 

 are held by English horses, but the invention of the loco- 

 motive has done away with the necessity for such trying 

 expeditions in civilized countries, and the horse is trained 

 more for speed and strength than for such long distance 

 efforts. M. de Pages in his travels round the world, tells a 

 remarkable story of the endurance of the horse when out of 

 his natural element; he says, "I should have found it diffi- 

 cult to give it credit had it not happened at this place 

 (the Cape of Good Hope) the evening before my arrival; 

 and if, besides the public notoriety of the fact, I had not 

 been an eyewitness of those vehement emotions of sympathy, 

 blended with admiration, which it had justly excited in the 

 mind of every individual at the Cape. A violent gale oi 

 wind setting in from north and north west, a vessel in the 

 road dragged her anchors, was forced on the rocks and 

 bulged; and, while the greater part of the crew fell an im- 

 mediate sacrifice to the waves, the remainder were seen from 

 the shore struggling for their lives, by clinging to the different 



