2 
LECTURES ON HORSES. 
and elucidate the structure and operations of that most curious 
and delicate and wonderful of the productions of Nature, — an 
animal machine. Simple and uniform, and beautiful in appear- 
ance, as are the exteriors of Nature’s organic creations, their in- 
teriors are in truth, in the sublime language of the psalmist, 
“ Fearfully and wonderfully made !” 
Such is the complexity and intricacy of the animal fabric, that, 
notwithstanding men of the greatest sagacity and spirit of research 
have, from the earliest ages, laboured in developing and explain- 
ing it, there still remain parts of the body whose structure is 
concealed in mystery; and as for the connexion subsisting be- 
tween body and mind, anatomists and physiologists of the present 
day are hardly more informed than were the metaphysicians of 
former ages. 
“ Through the dis-closing deep 
Light my blind way : The mineral strata there 
Thrust blooming. Thence the vegetable world, 
O’er that the rising system more complex 
Of animals, and higher still the mind.” 
Whenever a man has elaborated any complex or delicate piece 
of machinery, in order to preserve it he incloses it in some sort of 
case : in this he does but imitate Nature, who has furnished all 
her organic productions with complete tunics or cases— some of one 
kind, some of another, but all pleasing to view, and most completely 
effectual for the purpose of protection against such external agency 
as must of necessity be encountered. This covering — commonly 
called skin — is that which composes the exterior of the animal. But 
Nature does not stop here. In addition to a skin she has given a 
sort of clothing to animals: some she has covered with scales, some 
with feathers, some with wool, some with hair. From the ob- 
servations Lord Byron made in the course of his travels and resi- 
dences abroad, he was led to believe that even the hair of the 
head of a woman, if suffered to grow to its natural length, would 
in time serve as a vesture for her body. Man, in a savage un- 
clothed state, would no doubt appear in some such natural pilous 
garb as that in which Orson is pictorially represented. 
There is not only a difference in the material furnished by Na- 
ture as a clothing for animals, but there is an evident difference in 
the quality or texture of the same material, according to the breed 
or variety of the species : compare the coat of the cart-horse with 
that of the racer, or rather contrast it with the satin dress of the 
Arabian, and this difference will at once be manifest. Though 
there are, however, these striking and obvious distinctions as re- 
