152 TRAINING IN INDIA 



gallops, his style, however good it may have been originally, 

 will gradually accommodate itself to this pace, and will, in 

 course of time, become permanently altered, or take a long 

 period to recover. The reason for this is that the muscles 

 which are called into play, obeying a beneficent law of 

 nature, gradually acquire a style of action which will 

 enable them to perform their accustomed task with the 

 least possible exertion to themselves. Thus, when they 

 have become habituated to a slow gallop, they will be 

 unable to act at a fast pace to the best advantage, simply 

 because they are unused to it. This law is well proved 

 by the fact that training horses for long distances has 

 a very prejudicial effect on their speed for short races. 

 Most men, who have sparred much, know how slow the 

 use of heavy dumb-bells makes them. 



Continued slow work spoils the action of the horse, 

 in that it accustoms him to move his muscles slowly and 

 to take short strides. Besides this, as it does not call 

 into play his muscles of forced respiration (see page 160), 

 which are greatly used at fast paces, it is entirely 

 inadequate to render him "fit" to race. Work on deep 

 ground causes a horse to shorten his stride and to " dwell " 

 on it." The practice of carrying heavy weights makes 

 the animal go short. Training a horse on a hilly course, 

 when he has got to race on level ground, is a great 

 mistake — always supposing that he is sound — for, from 

 constantly going up hill, he soon learns to " go high ; " as 

 he finds, by doing so, that he lengthens his stride. I 

 need hardly say that although some really good horses, 

 like Lecturer, the Cesare witch winner of 1866, have high 

 action, we must acknowledge that they would be still 



