58 CONDITION. 
implicitly believe ; whose success I have compared with that 
of other systems, as have other trainers before me. This 
assurance renders me insistent in recommending it to those 
who have not had the same opportunities to test it. 
As a fitting conclusion of our subject, Condition, I will 
venture to give an extract frora an admirable work on the 
horse by Mr. Clark (from which I have already quoted at 
p. 24 on food) :— 
“But the greatest caution,” he remarks, “is necessary to be 
observed with horses that are very fat. They require a long 
course of moderate and regular exercise before they can be 
put to that which is the least violent with safety. Their 
fat, which they acquire by excessive heat, is melted by violent 
exercise as it were into oil, and carried into the blood and 
causes what is called an oily plethora, which produces a most 
violent and sudden inflammation of the lungs, &c. 
“The viscidity of the oily matter obstructing the vessels 
and preventing the other fluids passing through them, 
frequently occasions sudden death ; many instances of which I 
have known particularly in those horses which have been fed 
with a great quantity of boiled meat in order to fatten them 
for sale. To attain this desirable end and keep him in 
robust health in an artificial state we must bear in mind 
what he was when wild and imitate it as far as possible. 
“Count de Buffon says that very warm climates, it would 
appear, are destructive to horses, and that when they are 
transported from a mild climate to a very warm one the 
species degenerates, ” 
It therefore may be granted that horses like a medium 
climate bordering on cold rather than heat, for we find the same 
author (vol. 3 page 38) states that in Iceland, where the cold 
is extreme, horses though small are extremely vigorous. 
