INTRODUCTION. 131 



to Canton and to the Malay islands, the horse-shoe 

 is found nailed against buildings, under the same 

 system of mysterious superstition, and evidently 

 from a remote age, — for how, otherwise, could the 

 practice have spread over the whole world. "We 

 have seen it sculptured in bas-relief with a Runic 

 incription certainly as old as the ninth century, ac- 

 companying a figure of Ostar, upon a stone found 

 on the Hoheustein, near the Druden Altar in "West- 

 phalia, a place of Pagan worship that was destroyed 

 by the Franks in the wars of Charlemagne: had 

 the horse-shoe been invented in that age, it could 

 not already have become an object of mysterious 

 adaptation in the religion of barbarians which was 

 on the wane at least a century earlier. 



It has been remarked that the Romans paid only 

 a tardy and imperfect attention to breeding horses, 

 and Ave have observed also that the stature of these 

 animals, with exception of the races before named, 

 was below^ the present ordinary size. The Norman 

 pirates carried in their ships the small hardy breed 

 of Scandinavia, still in perfection in Iceland : all 

 the riding nations from the east and north, — Huns, 

 Bulgarians, Goths, and Magyars, had small horses : 

 those of the Ardennes, of many parts of France, of 

 the Camargue, of Switzerland, the Pyrenees, and Bri- 

 tain, were s'till smaller : the Netherland Menaphian 

 alone appear to have reached a full stature. It was 

 therefore in the first centuries after the Moslem inva- 

 sion of Spain, France, and Calabria, when art and 

 science began to revive, and the great empire of the 



