AGRICULTURE AND THE HORSE. 413 



unsound. I know this is so. The horse has, partly by 

 an inheritance of defects which are very apt to attend 

 a delicate organization, and partly through the abuse to 

 which he is subjected from his youth upwards, a lia- 

 bility to break down in many points where it would 

 seem as if Nature should have guarded and strengthened 

 him with peculiar care. That he becomes spavined and 

 ring-boned and curbed and splinted and broken-winded 

 ajid sore-toed, I will not deny. But all these seem to 

 me to grow out of man's determination to sppil his 

 horse ; for when we remember that the horse's foot is 

 the strongest structure of the kind in all the animal 

 kingdom, and that his hock is the most ingeniously 

 packed and contrived, and his fore-leg the best con- 

 structed to receive a blow, and his pasterns the finest 

 combination of elasticity and strength, and his lungs the 

 largest and most capacious, we can understand what 

 long generations of hardship and misuse he must have 

 passed through to bring upon each one of these impor- 

 tant and naturally powerful organs a peculiar dispo- 

 sition to break down. If you were to examine a horse 

 for the first time, you would say, " That foot cannot fail, 

 no matter how hard the road ; that pastern will not 

 give out ; that hock-joint will not yield to the hardest 

 strains ; those lungs will endure through all long and 

 severe driving on road or track." And the fact that 

 they do fail, and have so long failed, that they are 

 liable to congenital maleformation, is merely a proof that 

 no machine could be subjected to such strain as falls 



