MUTILATED HORSES. 327 



who squints. The ears resemble those of an antelope 

 when startled in the midst of her herd. The nostrils 

 wide : each of his nostrils resembles the den of a lion ; 

 the wind rushes out of it when he is panting. The 

 cavities in the interior of the nostrils ought to be en- 

 tirely black. If they be partly black and partly white, 

 the horse is only of moderate value." 



We pray our readers to note that the Arabs never 

 mutilate their horses, as too many of us still do. Their 

 ears and tails are left as nature made them, on the pro- 

 priety of which primitive treatment we cannot do better 

 than quote from that most wise and witty book, * The 

 Horse and his Eider/ by Sir Francis B. Head : 



" About forty years ago it was the general custom to 

 dock the tails of all hunters, covert hacks, and waggon- 

 horses so close that nothing remained of this pictur- 

 esque beautiful ornament of nature but an ugly stiff 

 stump, very little longer than the human thumb, which, 

 especially in the summer-time, was seen continually 

 wagging to the right and left, in impotent attempts to 

 brush off a hungry fly biting the skin more than a yard 

 off. At about the same period an officer in our army 

 took to the Cape of Good Hope a gentle, beautiful, 

 thorough-bred mare, which, to his astonishment, the 

 natives seemed exceedingly unwilling to approach. The 

 reason was that her ears had been cropped ; and as 

 among themselves that punishment was inflicted for 

 crimes, they were induced to infer that the handsome 

 mutilated animal had suffered from a similar cause in 

 fact, that she was vicious." 



But if a Mussulman think it a profanation to dock 

 the ears and tail of a horse, what would he say of the 

 ignorant barbarity of too many Christians, who actually 

 inflict blindness on the horse by extirpating the haw' 

 that curious appendage to the inner angle of the eye of 

 a horse, which consists of a dark membrane, whose 

 rapid transit over the eye, apparently at the will of the 

 animal, cleans the eyeball of dust or other particles ? 



