N0BMAN9. 53 



Coeur de Lion, is thus accurately described bj the im- 

 porter of the Percherons into New Jersey : ** They ave- 

 rage," he says, and we are personally cognizant of hii 

 accuracy, " full sixteen hands in height, with head short, 

 thick ; wide and hollow between the eyes ; jaws heavj ; 

 ears short, and pointed well forward ; neck very short and 

 thick; mane heavy; shoulder well inclined backward; 

 back extremely short ; rump steep ; quarters very broad ; 

 chest wide and deep ; tendons large ; muscles excessively 

 developed ; legs short, particularly from the knee and hock 

 to the fetlock, and thence to the coronet, which is covered 

 with long hair, covering half the hoof; much hair on the 

 legs." It was soon found even while complete armor was 

 in use, that these enormous, bony Normans, which are still 

 though deteriorated the ordinary, heavy draught horses 

 of France, had not sufficient speed to render the cavalry 

 charge effective, or sufficient blood to give spirit adequate 

 to the endurance of long-continued toil. The Andalusian 

 horse, which in its highest form, was a pure barb of Mo- 

 rocco, imported into Spain by the Saracen Moors under 

 Tarik, who has left his name to the rock of Gibraltar, and 

 in its secondary form, a half-bred horse, between the 

 African barbs and the old Spanish horse, which had long 

 oefore received a large tincture of Oriental blood from the 

 Numidian chargers of the Carthagenians, who so long oc- 

 cupied that country, proved, in its unmixed state, too light 

 for the enormous weight of a caparisoned man-at-arms, or, 

 if occasionally equal to that weight, too costly to be within 

 the means of any but crowned heads. " The bone and 

 muscle," observes the same writer we have before quoted, 

 ** and much of the form of the Percheron, come from this 

 horse" — ^that is, from the old Norman war-horse previously 

 described ; " and he gets his spirit and action from the 

 Andalusian. Docility comes from both sides. On tho 



