The old masters were all but accused of being in their 

 dotage. And still they also were right : the horse which 

 they described was, indeed, the good horse of their pe- 

 riod, the great performer over long distances. They 

 knew, as well as we do now, that a horse must be well 

 muscled, but the horse built on the lines of which they 

 were thinking could not have had the same muscular 

 relief as the chunky animal with short muscles that one 

 generally sees winning races now, and consequently they 

 did not draw the attention of their pupils to this point. 



They recommended horizontality of croup, and they 

 very correctly showed that the long horizontal croup was 

 that of the fast horse, of the horse with greater extent 

 of contraction, as opposed to the one with intense con- 

 traction. They had not even seen the animal of frequent 

 contraction. We have shown that this latter type with its 

 fore hand excessively lowered as the result of the ob- 

 liquity of the arm could not exist with a horizontal croup 

 unless the femur was shortened and thus rendered insuf- 

 ficient. To preserve a longer femur, it was necessary to 

 slope it and to keep a favorable incidence of muscle it 

 was necessary to rotate the hip. 



The horizontal croup, therefore, became impossible 

 with the new type. From that point it was but an easy 

 step to the inference that the horizontal croup was bad 

 in itself, and capable only of satisfying the misinformed 

 partisans of an arbitrary estheticism. Horizontality of 

 croup has become the bugbear of a goodly number of 

 present-day horsemen. 



And still there is no really smooth gait, no truly pro- 

 gressive propulsion, and consequently no easily sustained 

 effort without the long ischio-tibial muscles which are the 

 appurtenances of the horizontal croup, the croup of Mon- 

 arque, the croup of Fitz-Gladiator, and that of their prod- 

 uce, and all who have ridden the sons of these celebrated 



30 



