LECTURES ON HORSES. 
483 
a horse drawn or fallen away, certainly presents nothing extraor- 
dinary. There must have been a remarkable squareness about 
the body of Eclipse, inasmuch as lines running transversely from 
the withers to the stifle, and from the summit of the rump to 
the elbow, proved of equal lengths. What his actual girth was 
does not appear ; but, according to the depth of his shoulders, it is 
evident he must have been deep in his chest, or let down in his 
brisket ; and that his circularity of chest did not prevail in the 
fore parts, so as to throw his fore limbs wide apart, is certain, from 
the measurement of the interval between his arms being no more 
than seven inches. 
The dip in Eclipse’s back does not appear to have exceeded 
much two inches ; it might, according to St. Bel’s account, have 
been three inches ; so that he could not have been a horse that 
“ rose” much in his withers : his height was sixty-six inches, and 
he measured two heads and twenty parts, or sixty-four inches, in 
the middle of his back, just posterior to the place of dip; for 
which I allow (too much, perhaps) an inch, making the amount of 
dip, as I said before, at the very utmost, three inches. From the 
place of dip, the line of his back inclined (in a curve) upwards, 
rising at the summit-point of his quarters to one inch higher than 
he rose at the withers, from which it very gradually declined, but 
not with much incurvation, if any, to the tail. Eclipse, therefore, 
had a back roached rather towards the loins, but straight quarters, 
and, as we shall find, also lengthy quarters. 
What we have to admire, as much, perhaps, as any points in 
Eclipse, is the length and breadth of his arms and thighs : he being, 
in the fullest sense of the words, a large-limbed horse. His arm 
measured, across, from the front to the point of the elbow, the sur- 
prising breadth of ten inches, and was longer by two inches than, 
according to the length of the entire limb, it is in horses in general ; 
the measurement, by the scale, being equal between the elbow and 
bend of the knee, and the latter and the ground : immediately above 
the knee the arm measured five inches across, shewing that it pre- 
served its great breadth all the way down. 
For the relative lengths of the different parts of the fore limb, 
we must content ourselves with St. Bel’s measurements of the 
bones. The radius was sixteen inches long, the cannon-bone 
twelve inches; the pastern, coronet, and coffin-bones, together, 
seven inches in length : from all which it seems, according to the 
measurement of other horses, we may infer that Eclipse had, with 
his long and broad arms, short cannons, and by no means lengthy 
pasterns. 
There must have existed considerable harmony of proportion, 
and consequently beauty of form, in Eclipse’s hind quarters. A 
