B. VI.] THE HISTOEY OF ANIMALS. 169 



becomes hard like a stone when it is coagulated ; this takes 

 place if it is not mixed with water. They do not produce 

 young before they are a year old, except in some remarkable 

 cases, for some have been known to copulate at four months 

 old. Most of them desire sexual intercourse in the months 

 of April and May. Some, however, are not impregnated 

 before the autumn. When many become pregnant and 

 admit the male, it is a sign of cold and rainy weather. The 

 usual discharges occur in cows as they do in mares, but the 

 quantity is less. 



CHAPTEB XXII. 



1. BOTH the horse and mare begin to use sexual intercourse 

 at two years old. Such early cases, however, are rare, and 

 their offspring small and weak ; and generally they com- 

 mence at three years old, and they continue to produce 

 better colts till they are twenty years old. The period of 

 gestation is eleven months; parturition takes place in the 

 twelfth. The male does not impregnate the female in any 

 particular number of days ; but at times in one, two, or 

 three, sometimes in more. The ass mounts and impregnates 

 more quickly than the horse ; and the act of intercourse is 

 not laborious in horses as it is in oxen. Next to the human 

 subject, the horse in both sexes is the most lascivious of all 

 animals. The sexual intercourse of the younger horses takes 

 place before the usual age according to the goodness and 

 abundance of their food. The horse generally produces but 

 one colt, or sometimes two at the outside. The hemionus has 

 also been known to produce two, but this is considered extra- 

 ordinary. The horse begins sexual intercourse at thirty 

 months old, so that it can produce proper colts when it has 

 done changing its teeth. Some have been known, they say, 

 to impregnate mares while changing their teeth, unless they 

 were naturally barren. 



2. The horse has forty teeth. It sheds its four first teeth 

 at thirty months old, two above and two below. A year 

 afterwards, it sheds four more in the same manner, two 

 above and two below. And again, at the end of the next 

 year, it sheds four more in the same manner. "When it is 

 four years and a half old, it sheds no more ; and individuals 

 hava 'been known to shed them all at first, and others that 



