170 THE HORSE OF AMERICA. 



ity on the horse, both in England and in this country. He seems 

 to have been a practitioner of veterinary surgery, and from the 

 number of volumes which he published successfully, he must 

 have been a man of ability and education. There can be no 

 question that he knew a great deal quite too much to know any- 

 thing well. The first edition of his work on the horse was pub- 

 lished in 1831, and soon after its appearance several publishing 

 houses in this country seized upon it as very valuable, and each 

 one of them soon had an edition of it before the public. It pur- 

 ports to have been written at the instance of "The Society for 

 the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge." This declaration was a 

 good thing, in a commercial view, and no doubt it did much in 

 extending the circulation of the book. Without tarrying to note 

 several minor historical blunders, I will go direct to one relating 

 to the gait of the horse, which is now under consideration. In 

 his fourth edition, page 535, he incidentally discusses the mech- 

 anism of the pace, and after speaking of the Elgin Marbles, to 

 which I have referred at the beginning of this chapter, and after 

 conceding that two of the four horses are not galloping but pac- 

 ing, he says: 



" Whether this was then the mode of trotting or not, it is certain that it is 

 never seen to occur in nature in the present day; and, indeed, it appears quite 

 inconsistent with the necessary balancing of the body, and was, therefore, more 

 probably an error of the artist." 



This remark is simply amazing in an author who pretentiously 

 undertakes to instruct his countrymen in the history of the horse 

 when he knows nothing about that history. If he had gone back 

 only twenty-two years, "Old John Lawrence," in his splendid 

 quarto, would have told him about the pacer. If he had gone 

 back one hundred and sixty years, the Duke of Newcastle would 

 have explained to him the complete and perfect mechanism of 

 the pacing gait. If he had gone still further back and examined 

 Gervaise Markham, Blundeville, Polydore Virgil, and Fitz 

 Stephen the Monk, of the twelfth century, any and all of them 

 would have explained to him the pacing habit of action and shown 

 him that for many successive centuries the pacing horse was the 

 popular and fashionable horse of the realm. If Mr. Youatt had 

 lived to see John R. Gentry pace a mile in 2:OOJ; Robert J. in 

 2:01-J, and dozens of others in less than 2:10, he might have 

 changed his mind and concluded that it was possible, after all, for 



