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 

 inscription certainly as old as the ninth century, ac- 

 companying a figure of Ostar, upon a stone found 

 on the Hohenstein, 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 we 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 still smaller: the Nethcrland 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 



