Chap. 66.] 
HORSES. 
321 
ing up to the thirty-third year, and it is not till after the twen- 
tieth that they are taken for this purpose from the Circus. 
At Opus/* it is said, a horse served as a stallion until his 
fortieth year ; though he required some assistance in raising the 
fore part of the body. There are few animals, however, in 
which the generative powers are so limited, for which reason 
it is only admitted to the female at certain intervals indeed it 
cannot cover as many as fifteen times in the course of one year.^^ 
The sexual passion of the mare is extinguished by cropping her 
mane ; she is capable of bearing every year up to the fortieth. 
We have an account of a horse having lived to its seventy-fifth 
year. The mare brings forth standing upright, and is attached, 
beyond all other animals, to her offspring. The horse is born 
with a poisonous substance on its forehead, known as hippo- 
manes,^^ and used in love philtres ; it is the size of a fig, and of 
a black colour ; the mother devours it immediately on the birth 
of the foal, and until she has done so, she will not suckle it. 
When this substance can be rescued from the mother, it has 
the property of rendering the animal quite frantic by the 
smell. If a foal has lost its mother, the other mares in the 
herd that have young, will take charge of the orphan. It 
is said that the young of this animal cannot touch the earth 
with the mouth for the first three days after its birth. The 
more spirited a horse is, the deeper does it plunge its nose into 
the water while drinking. The Scythians prefer mares for 
the purposes of war, because they can pass their urine without 
stopping in tlieir career. 
*8 See B. iv. c. 12. 
*9 Varro, ubi szipra, gives considerably different directions on this point ; 
he says, Intercourse is to be allowed, at the proper season of the year, 
twice a day, morning and evening." 
50 This sentence in Columella, uM szipra, seems to illustrate the meaning, 
which is somewhat obscure ; *'Veruntamen nec minus quam quindecim, nec 
plures quam viginti, unus debet implore " — One male ought to be coupled 
with not more than twenty females, nor less than fifteen." 
5^ Cuvier states, that the hippomanes is a concretion occasionally found 
in the liquor amnii of the mare, and which it devours, from the same kind 
of instinctive feeling which causes quadrupeds generally to devour the after- 
birth. He remarks, however, that this can have no connection with the 
attachment which the mother bears to her offspring ; Ajasson, vol. vi, p. 
459 ; Lemaire, vol. iii. p. 495. The hippomanes is said to have been em- 
ployed by the sorceresses of antiquity, as an ingredient in their amatory po- 
tions. See Aristotle, Hist. Anim. B. viii. c. 24, and -^lian, Anim. Nat. 
B. xiv. c. 18. — B. See also B. xxviii. c. 11. 
VOL. II. 
T 
