THE HORSE, 



IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA AS HE HAS 

 BEEN, AND AS HE IS. 



OF all the beasts of the field, which, as we are tod, the Lord formed out of the 

 earth, and brought unto Adam to see what he would call them, none has more 

 engaged the attention of the historian and the philosopher none has figured more ir 

 poetry and romance, than the horse. 



Coeval with their domestication, and the knowledge of 'their admirable capacities 

 to minister to our comforts and pleasures, according to Plutarch, the sentiment has 

 been common to all good men, to treat the horse and the dog with especial kindness, 

 and to cherish them carefully, even when the infirmities of age and long service have 

 rendered them useless. 



For the volumes which have been written on the Horse, whether more or less 

 authentic, as to his original country, his natural history, the time of his subjugation 

 to th use of man, and the various purposes for which he has been employed, 

 whether in the homely gear of field-labour, or in the gorgeous trappings of the tour- 

 nament or chariot of war on all these points of his history and his uses, we might 

 refer the curious reader to various works, some of them elegant, alike in their embel- 

 lishments and their literature ; but to quote and to collate them here, would be to 

 depart from the line of practical utility prescribed for the execution of our task ; 

 hence, keeping that object constantly in view, we shall merely glance at what has been 

 written of his early history and services, and so come down rapidly to the period in the 

 history of the English horse where, after successive importations of foreign stallions, 

 and the observance of judicious systems of breeding, the stock of the mother country, 

 from which ours is derived, had attained about the days of Flying Childers, in th" 

 beginning of the last century, a high degree, if not its maximum of excellence. It 

 was when so improved that the horse was imported into our then British Colonies : 

 and what, after all, it may be asked, is there economical and thrifty in our agricul- 

 tural and domestic habits or good in our political and social institutions, the ele- 

 ments and general outline of which we have not derived from Old England 1 Some 

 orchardists contend that a branch cut from an old trunk and grafted on a young scion, 

 will, nevertheless, sympathize with the parent stock, and under the laws of vegetable 

 life, will decay as the parent tree declines ! Does the theory sometimes apply to 

 ountries and governments 1 or shall we thrive nationally, as plants grow larger and 

 lore robust when transplanted from the seed-bed into wider space and freer circula 

 non ? But these are questions for the politician. 



None of the writings to which we could point the reader contain more frequent 

 mention, or more glowing descriptions of the power and beauty of the Horse, than 

 the great book jf bonks ! The Bible teaches us that from whatever land this anima] 

 may have been 'originally brought into Egypt, that country had already become a great 

 horse market, even before horses were known in Arabia; the country with which 

 we are apt to associate all that is most interesting in the history of this noble beast. 

 Geol-'gicai researches, however, have discovered fossil remains of the horse in almost 

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