140 BITS AND BITTING. 



the snaffle ; but when the horse has once acquired the 

 carriage and the degree of feehng that may be required, 

 then no pains should be spared in bitting him correctly, 

 otherwise all the previous labour is lost. 



And this brings us to a very difficult and very im- 

 portant point. Each style of riding, to use a common 

 expression — or every particular kind of service that may 

 be demanded of a horse, to use a more correct one — 

 demands a corresponding variety of carriage and degree 

 of feeling, and consequently of bitting. On the three 

 older continents we find the following styles predomi- 

 nant : School-riding, as a preparation for the circus or 

 for military piu*poses, and wdiat may be called natural 

 riding. What we understand by this latter is not how 

 the farmer jogs to market with a sack of wheat behind 

 his saddle, but the methods of riding adopted and 

 transferred from generation to generation amongst those 

 nations or large communities who are compelled to live 

 on horseback, either in self-defence, or to gain their 

 existence, or for both reasons. This is, in fact, un- 

 cultivated military equitation ; and the purely em- 

 pirical principles on which it is founded are such 

 that they readily accommodate themselves to the scien- 

 tific principles of school-riding, with which it, how- 

 ever, only comes in contact in the east of Europe, if 

 we except, perhaps, om- own Indian possessions and 

 Algeria. 



Cossacks, Circassians, Hungarians, Poles — these are 

 the European and western Asian representatives of the 

 style of riding alluded to here. They furnish its best 

 and most easily formed light cavalries, heavy cavalry 

 having been originally the parent, and subsequently the 

 pupil, of the school or manege. But in the west of 



