84 Among Men and Horses. 



this respect ; but their view was directed to an animal on 

 the dissecting table and not in action. I had yarned about 

 the conformation of horses with my racing, hunting and 

 veterinary friends for so many years, and had tried so hard 

 to draw practical deductions about it, that, in my self-conceit, 

 I considered I was capable of posing as an instructor, and 

 accordingly wrote a book. It of course contained all the old 

 silly platitudes about the desirability of a horse being ' long 

 and low/ 'good to follow,' etc. Following the footsteps of 

 my predecessors, I tried to gauge the merits of all horses, by 

 comparing them with an ideal steed of my own conception. I 

 wrote this book, added some illustrations, made all arrange- 

 ments for its publication, gave the MS. to a friend to take to 

 the printer, and, as I have explained in the preface of a 

 recent work, never saw it again ; for my friend luckily forgot 

 it in a hansom, and cabby appears to have wisely considered 

 that it was not worth the trouble of taking to the Scotland 

 Yard lost property office, which I haunted for weeks in a 

 state of desperation. I became soon consoled for my loss ; 

 for every day's experience gained at Newmarket, forced on 

 me the conviction that the empirical conclusions which I 

 had desired to commit to print, were crude and faulty in the 

 extreme. About the same time I got an opportunity of read- 

 ing Professor Marey's Machine Animate, and Dr Pettigrew's 

 small work on the same subject. Light had at last come ! 

 I at once rejected all the rule-of-thumb fables ; and set my- 

 self to seriously study the horse as a living locomotive, and 

 to investigate the differences in construction demanded by 

 the requirements, respectively, of speed and strength. To 

 test my conclusions, I invested in a six-foot tape measure, 

 which I placed in my pocket, ready to run the rule over 

 any animal whose points I wished, and was permitted, to 

 examine carefully. This rigid method soon convinced me 

 that the more a horse approached the heavy cart type, the 

 longer and lower did he become, and vice versa, I need not 

 allude to this subject further ; as it is fully discussed in The 



