THE 
VETERINARIAN. 
VOL. XVI, No. 191. NOVEMBER 1843. New Series, No. 23. 
LECTURES ON HORSES. 
By William Percivall, M.R.C.S., Veterinary Surgeon 
First Life Guards. 
ACTION. 
PROPERLY speaking, the phrase locomotion denotes the 
faculty an animal possesses of transporting his body or moving him- 
self from place to place ; the term action expressing his mode or 
manner of doing this. No horse, in his healthy or normal state, is 
without the power of locomotion ; though there are only certain 
horses that, in the estimation of the connoisseur, possess action. 
Action, however, is not infrequently used in a generic sense, being 
then synonymous with locomotion ; the kind of action being ex- 
pressed by such epithets as good, bad, high, low, round, darting, 
& c., and this is the sense in which I purpose employing it on the 
present occasion. 
For the performance of action or locomotion, two sets of struc- 
tures are needful : one, which is passive, the bones, I have already 
had under consideration ; the other, the active power, the muscles , 
I shall now consider. 
THE MUSCLES. 
The flesh investing the osseous fabric of an animal body proves, 
on dissection, divisible into numerous distinct pieces or portions, 
various in shape and magnitude, and so disposed that, through a 
power every portion, independently, possesses of contracting or 
shortening its length, the bones are flexed or extended one on the 
other, according as is required for the purposes of action or loco- 
motion. That inimitable piece of mechanism, the skeleton, is, as 
we have already seen, so constructed as to admit of the bones, 
through the means of their joints, moving upon each other, to that 
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