CONDITION OF PEDESTRIANS. 57 ' 



authenticated fact that Fisherman was two stone and a half 

 the better horse. I may add I never saw the tables turned ; 

 a fat horse beating a thin one so vastly his superior ; nor do I 

 think any one else ever did.^ 



I think I may fairly assume enough has been said to 

 convince even the sceptical that horses must and do run light 

 from other causes than overwork or mismanagement But 

 I am prepared to do more : to assert that as a matter of fact 

 there are more horses insufficiently trained and looking too big 

 than there are overdone with work. I mean of course for long 

 distance races, not short ones ; for which, as less work will 

 suffice, horses may be run bigger. I am strenuous on this 

 point ; but I may remind the reader that I am not descanting 

 on the merits or usages of this or the other trainer ; but am 

 contending for a principle in the superiority of which I myself 



^ Turning from the horse to the human being, the condition of pedestrians may 

 be taken as an instance to point my observations. A pedestrian when fit to 

 walk a long or short distance looks." starved, more like a skeleton than a man in 

 robust health living upon the most nutritious food without stint. At the time 

 " Corkey" accomplished his surprising six days' walk at the Agricultural Hall he 

 weighed but eight stone : a proof that he was neither fat nor in what is ordinarily 

 supposed to be good condition. Fattest men are not as a rule the greatest eaters, 

 nor do they confine themselves to a diet more nutritious than that of the spare and 

 meagre. The late Mr. Banting could not check his obesity by abstinence in the 

 matter of food. The nobility and gentry live well, yet as a rule they are spare 

 men. In the workhouse or the cottage, on the other band, we find those who 

 fatten on the poorest of food, and in many cases an insufficiency of that. In my 



own experience I remember Mr. F. H then living at Exeter, a very thin man, 



to all appearance but half fed, who once at the instigation of Mr. S (on 



whose authority I give the anecdote) undertook to eat a roasting pig for supper— 

 and did it ; a feat that probably would have bothered the renowned Dan Lambert, 

 Yet until the day of his death he remained as cadaverous and as thin as ever, in 

 spite of his appetite. A correspondent of the Lancet lately sent particulars to 

 that paper of the case of Mr. W. Campbell, landlord of "the Duke of Welling- 

 ton," Newcastle on Tyne, who "stands 6 feet 4 inches, and weighs over 50 stone," 

 yet, "his appetite is not more than an average one, and although not an abstainer, 

 he is moderate in his drinking." 



