PRINCIPLES OF FEEDING. 239 



gine this to be true — it is very like the stuff found in the 

 treatises on dietetics — and there is no difhcuUy in seeing the 

 superiority of hard food. Without any theory, however, 

 upon the subject, appearances seem in favor of the common 

 opinion. 



The continuous use of Hard Food is supposed to produce 

 progressive increase of vigor for several months, or, accord- 

 ing to some, for several years. Among stablemen it is a com- 

 mon way of recommending a horse, to say that he has got a 

 year's hard keep in him. Nimrod has gone much further. 

 Speaking of post-horses, the work they do, sometimes sixty 

 miles in a day, and the abuse they suffer from exposure to 

 the weather, from bad stables, and bad grooms, he alludes to 

 their condition, and asks how it is that, in defiance of such 

 hard usage, they look so well and do so much. "Is it," he 

 says, " therr natural physical strength 1 Is it the goodness 

 of their naMire ? My reasoning faculty tells me it is neither 

 — they would both fail. No ! it is solely to be attributed to 

 the six, eight, ten, twelve, perhaps fourteen years' hard meat 

 which they have got in them — to that consolidation of flesh, 

 that invigorating of muscle, that stimulus to their nature, 

 which this high keep has imparted to them — which give 

 them, as it were, a preternatural power." 



Had Nimrod always written thus, he should never have 

 been quoted by me. There is not, in all his letters, another 

 passage so remarkable for bad reasoning and bad writing. 

 No one ever knew a post-horse twelve or fourteen years on 

 the road without interruption. If he had occasionally to per- 

 form a journey of sixty miles in one day, he would often, in 

 the course of so many years, require to be thrown off work 

 for several successive weeks, either for lameness or for sick- 

 ness ; and every time such a horse is idle for a number of 

 weeks, he loses all the vigor which previous work and solid 

 food had conferred. 



When horses are well fed, they are generally well worked. 

 In the course of time they acquire strength and endurance, 

 which the undomesticated horse can never rival. Solid food 

 has perhaps a good deal to do in the production of such vigor, 

 but the work has much more. Without work, no kind nor 

 quantity of food will make a hunter or a racer. To encounter 

 extraordinary labor, the horse must be trained to it ; and, while 

 training, he must be fed on solid food, or at least upon rich 

 food. 



It appears that solid is better than soft food for such work ; 



