LECTURES ON HORSES. 
405 
“ He was such a one to bend his knees, 
And tuck his haunches in*;” 
the “ tucking of the haunches in,” as I remarked before, having 
a mighty deal to do with the pace. “ The horse that points out 
his fore legs, and goes with his knee straight, is no trotter,” says 
John Lawrence t ; “ he loses time by over-striding.” 
So far as we are able, from general observation, to say what is 
the fittest form or structure for a trotting horse, w T e may set it 
down as a rule having but few exceptions, that shortness of the 
shafts or cylindrical bones of the limbs, and uprightness in the 
joints, are more conducive to the performance of this action than 
length and obliquity. Few race-horses can trot well, owing to 
the lengthiness of their limbs and springiness of their joints; and 
as for cart-bred horses, though they possess the requisite shortness 
of make, their comparatively broad and lax structure is, as I said 
before, calculated rather for strength than speed. In general, 
horses celebrated for feats of trotting are by no means pleasant 
hackneys : when put out at their speed, they use their limbs with 
that quickness that does not allow time for the operation of suffi- 
cient elasticity to amount to spring, and with that force which 
greatly tends to destroy elasticity ; the consequence is, that many 
or most famous trotters are what riding connoisseurs call “ bone- 
setters.” 
To conclude this lecture with some accounts of the feats of trot- 
ting horses, we cannot, that I know of, consult better authority 
on what has been performed in days gone by than John Lawrence, 
who appears, as well as being a sporting character himself, to 
have been at some pains to chronicle these performances. “ The 
fastest trotter” which, this writer has good reason to suppose, 
“ has ever been tried in England, was called Archer, from the 
name of the person who brought him to London.” Mr. La wrence 
could not conceive Archer’s rate of trotting (for a short distance) 
“ could be below twenty-five miles an hour /” A brown mare, the 
property of Bishop — a London dealer in horses — not so speedy as 
Archer, but of greater strength and endurance, is said to have 
been the first horse that ever trotted sixteen miles in one hour with 
twelve stone of burthen, and she performed the distance in fifty- 
eight minutes and some odd seconds. “ In 1793, Crockett’s grey 
mare trotted one hundred miles in twelve hours, and had twenty 
minutes to spare.” — “ In 1792, a yellow-bay gelding, called Spi- 
der,” * * “ trotted twenty-four miles in an hour and an half.” And 
* I know not if I quote correctly. In truth, I have almost lost sight of 
the famous old ballad. Can any person favour me with a copy of it ? 
t Treatise on Horses, &c. 1810 . 
