140 BITS AND BITTING. 



And this brings us to a very difficult and very im- 

 portant point. Each style of riding, to use a common 

 expression or every particular kind of service that may 

 be demanded of a horse, to use a more correct one 

 demands a corresponding variety of carriage and degree 

 of feeling, and consequently of bitting. On the three 

 older continents we find the following styles predomi- 

 nant : School-riding, as a preparation for the circus or 

 for military purposes, and what may be called natural 

 riding. What we understand by this latter is not how 

 the farmer jogs to market with a sack of wheat behind 

 his saddle, but the methods of riding adopted and 

 transferred from generation to generation amongst 

 those nations or large communities who are compelled 

 to live on horseback, either in self-defence, or to gain 

 their existence, or for both reasons. This is, in fact, 

 uncultivated military equitation ; and the purely em- 

 pirical principles on which it is founded are such that 

 they readily accommodate themselves to the scientific 

 principles of school-riding, with which it, however, only 

 comes in contact in the east of Europe, if we except, 

 perhaps, our own Indian possessions and Algeria. 



Cossacks, Circassians, Hungarians, Poles these are 

 the European and western Asian representatives of the 

 style of riding alluded to here. They furnish its best 

 and most easily formed light cavalries, heavy cavalry 

 having been originally the parent, and subsequently the 

 pupil, of the school or manege. But in the west of 

 Europe this nursery for light cavalry has long ceased 

 to exist. Perhaps the latest remnants of it were the 

 Border-riders on the Scotch and English Marches. 

 Indeed, the few civilian riders that were to be found in 

 France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Holland, &c,, till 



