14 LESSONS IN HORSE JUDGING. 



a stimulant, as we have before seen. In a few 

 hours or days the general stiffness disappears and 

 leaves the body quite flaccid, that is, the cold has 

 exhausted all the muscular irritability. In ani- 

 mals that are hunted to death, such as foxes, that 

 are kiUed after being chased and able to run no 

 further, or whose muscles have lost their irrita- 

 bility or power of further contracting, this rigor 

 mortis, or stiffness of the body after death, never 

 takes place. So it is with animals who die after 

 long and exhausting iUnesses, the stiffness after 

 death either occurs, or occurs so slightly as hardly 

 to be observed. Animals killed by lightning are 

 also never stiff after death. The lightning being 

 so powerful a stimulant as to exhaust the irrita- 

 bility of the muscles instantly. 



7. — This irritability of muscle can be stored up 

 in vast quantities when the muscle is in what is 

 termed good tone. When we speak of a horse, a 

 hunter for example, being in condition, we mean 

 that his muscles are in good tone ; or, in other words, 

 that his muscles can lay in large quantities of irri- 

 tability, which takes hours of hard toil to exhaust. 

 The process by which the muscles are brought to 

 * tone ' is called ^ conditioning.' When large quan- 

 tities of this irritability have been stored, the first 

 expenditure of it is intensely pleasurable, and this 

 pleasurable excitement, unrestrained, which it 

 often is on first coming out of the stable, is called 

 ^freshness.' Shortly, when some of the irrita- 

 bility or freshness has gone off, further expen- 

 diture of irritability causes neither pleasure nor 

 pain, but indifference, and the horse is said to 



