76 THE HOESE AND HIS EIDER. 



When Alexander the Great pompously asked Diogenes 

 what he could do to serve him, the cynic curtly replied, 

 " Gret out of my sunshine" In like manner if a heavy 

 man, patting his hunter on the neck, were to ask 

 "What can I do to please you?" the dumb animal, if 

 he could but speak, would just as bluntly reply, " Get 

 off my back ;" and yet men, especially heavy ones, will 

 throughout a long day sit smiling in their saddles, 

 without reflecting that by doing so they are every 

 minute and every hour wearying muscles which, after 

 having carried them brilliantly in one run, are, if a 

 second fox can be found, to be required to carry them 

 through another. 



A deal board of the length of a horse's back, with 

 its ends resting on the bottoms of two chairs, would 

 break, a stout pole would snap, and a rod of iron would 

 bend, under the feet of a heavy man jumping upon 

 them only for a few minutes ; and yet the same heavy 

 man who in the same short period would become dead 

 tired of carrying even his only child, neglects to consider 

 the mechanical effects caused by the mere pressure (to 

 say nothing of the concussion produced by jumping) for 

 seven or eight hours of fourteen, sixteen, or eighteen 

 stone on a horse's back, which is not a solid bone, but 

 one scotched or sawn by Nature into a decreasing series 

 of twenty-nine vertebrae (namely, dorsal, 18 ; lumbar, 6 ; 



