THE MUSCLES. 109 



further, we shall find some such differance existing between the 

 muscular fibre of the high and that of the low bred animal. In 

 proportion as the fibres of flesh run fine and free from adulteration 

 of adipose and cellular tissue, so are they apt and powerful in 

 action. The heart is one of the finest and cleanest muscles in the 

 body, being required to act with promptness, energy, and duration ; 

 and for the same reasons blood-horses are constituted of finer and 

 cleaner muscular fibre than cart and mongrel-bred horses. 



Independently, however, of original constitution, muscular fibres 

 will be large and clean and fit for action according to the exercise 

 or work they may have been in the habit of performing for some 

 considerable time past. When we hear it said that one horse (of 

 the same breed) is " in condition," and another " not," we may take 

 it for granted that the muscles of the one have, through a course of 

 exercise and labour, called training, been got into that state of per- 

 fection wherein they are capable of performing double or treble 

 what they could have done in a state of idleness or comparative 

 inactivity ; and hence it is that by all connoisseurs in horseflesh so 

 much importance is ever laid upon condition. The same horse in 

 condition and out of condition might be, without much hyperbole, 

 pronounced to be quite a different species of animal ; for not the 

 muscles only, but the bones, and no doubt other parts as well, 

 under such totally opposite circumstances, undergo, in the course of 

 time, very material alterations in their composition. Indeed, to 

 minute differences of texture existing between the organs of loco- 

 motion in animals of high and low breeding — taking into our ac- 

 count the amount of nervous energy either respectively possess — 

 would appear to be mainly attributable those differences of action 

 and capability so characteristic of the two breeds. The race-horse 

 and cart-horse have the same number and shape of bones and mus- 

 cles, the same locomotive apparatus, in fact, both as regards frame- 

 work, jointing, arrangement, and distribution ; and yet nobody 

 expects the cart-horse to run a race, or the race-horse to go to 

 plough or drag a brewer's dray. St. Bel took up this interesting 

 question, and considered the explanation of it to reside in the re- 

 spective weights of the animals and in the " mechanical arrange- 

 ment" of the locomotive organs. His words are, " How different is 

 the gallop of the large dray-horse from that of the race-horse ! It 



