200 THE HORSE IN HISTORY 



As we come to the close of the nineteenth 

 and the opening of the twentieth centuries 

 historical records increase enormously in volume, 

 so that now we find ourselves confronted by a 

 mass of reports, many of which bear directly 

 upon horses that are of no interest whatever, 

 though they may have belonged to famous men 

 whose names are still household words. 



Thus in a single history of Napoleon I. we 

 find two pages of descriptive matter to do with 

 a horse of his called Wagram ; two pages about 

 Cyrus, another of his horses ; a page about his 

 horse named Emir ; half-a-page about his Coco ; 

 three pages about Gongalve ; two about Coquet ; 

 three about Tausis, and so on all the way through, 

 while everything that is said about them could 

 quite easily be condensed into three or four short 

 sentences. 



Indeed the biographers of the majority of our 

 great military leaders have deemed it necessary 

 to write long and verbose descriptions of the 

 animals that were owned by these historical 

 celebrities, apparently for no other reason than 

 that they did belong to celebrities. 



When all is said, it is difficult to imagine how 

 or whence they can have obtained such circum- 

 stantial information. Granting, however, the 

 truth of all the statements and one cannot say 

 definitely that any one of them is not true in 

 every detail was it worth while to tell us that 



