4: LESSONS IN HORSE JUDGING. 



cord. If yon had to apply a galvanic battery to a 

 muscle, before long you would exhaust all its irrita- 

 bility, that is, in time it would cease to contract, 

 showing that there is only a certain amount of 

 irritability in the muscle. If all the muscles of the 

 body contract at the same time, the whole body is 

 perfectly rigid or stifif, a thing we never see in 

 health, but which we see in a modified state after 

 death, and which is called rigor mortis. This 

 general stiffness, or rigor mortis, comes on as the 

 body cools : the cold acting as 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 animals that are hunted to 

 death, such as foxes, that are killed after being 

 chased and able to run no further, or whose muscles 

 have lost their irritability 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 illnesses, 

 the stiffness after death either never 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 irritability of the muscles in- 

 stantly. 



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 



