THE HORSE IN MOTION. Ill 



herited, nor can It be transmitted to descendants, as is asserted by some 

 authors. Functions and faculties, or the power by which acts are per- 

 formed and habits acquired, may be inherited. No man is able to trans- 

 mit to his offspring his acquirements, whether of mind or body. The 

 child of the most profound scholar will not know one letter from another 

 until he is taught them, and will learn them no more easily for all his 

 parent's attainments. Nascitur, non Jit (born, not made) is as true 

 in this sense now as ever it was. The faculty through which the 

 parent was enabled to acquire any accomplishment, whether mental or 

 physical, may be transmitted to offspring. Even these are not congeni- 

 tal or coincident with birth, as the function of breathing is; but the 

 tendency is inherited, and the functions will be developed at the 

 proper time, and in the order that their exercise will be required, first 

 for the existence, protection, and development of the individual, then 

 for the full employment of all the powers successively with which it 

 was endowed by inheritance. The law of inherited or constitutional 

 disease is the same; all are not congenital, but most of them are 

 developed, like consumption, at the age of puberty, and others, like 

 cancer, at mature life, from inherited tendencies. 



When the colt is seen soon after birth, he must be helped upon his 

 feet, and the first efforts of his long and feeble limbs are to walk, in 

 which he instinctively obeys the law to alternate the limbs and so pre- 

 serve its balance. More than this he cannot do. Visit him a few days 

 later, and he will be found not only able to walk with firmness, but to 

 trot away from your approach. When you next visit him, after a 

 longer interval of time, he has acquired much greater control of his 

 locomotive organs, and he will move off in a trot with no uncertain 

 step, and, if you pursue, he will break into a run (Plate XLII.). 



The last pace is no less intuitive than the first, but required a 

 longer period for its development. It is an acquired pace, but not 

 the less intuitive. There is great doubt whether the complicated 

 movement of the run, which has so long eluded the comprehension 

 of man, was ever any better understood by the most sagacious of the 

 quadrupeds that practised it ; and the identical character of the move- 

 ment through so many species of them shows that it is inherited, or 



