550 MR. youatt’s veterinary lectures. 
room, and where it is most wanted, for the play of the lungs ; and, 
at the same time, where the weight does not press so exclusively 
on the fore-legs, and expose the feet to concussion and injury. 
A Jarrow-chested Horses. —We shall see many horses with 
narrow chests, and a great deal of daylight under them, that have 
plenty of spirit and willingness for work. They shew them¬ 
selves well off, and exhibit the address and gratify the vanity of 
their riders on the parade or in the park, but they have not the 
appetite nor the endurance that could carry them through three 
successive days’ hard work. As for the spider-legged, weedy 
animals that some of our young men are so fond of sporting, he 
who has looked at the horse with a practised eye would scarcely 
give them stable-room ; while he is often tempted to draw a 
comparison between the want of capacity in the chest of the horse 
and the cranium of the rider, not very favourable to the latter. 
Thick Wind accompanying the Round Chest. — If we had 
arrived at the diseases of the chest, I should call on you to exercise 
your reason, and not to forget what experience has taught you. 
The circularly-barrelled horse is generally thick-winded. In the 
first place, he is too fond of eating and drinking, and his gorged 
stomach is too frequently and too weightily pressing against the 
diaphragm, and causing increased labour in the muscles of respi¬ 
ration, and, consequently, rapid exhaustion; next, there is so much 
fat in and about the chest, that the lungs are scarcely capable of 
long-continued laborious action; and lastly, and most of all, as the 
circular chest cannot enlarge to any great degree, and yet purified 
blood must be supplied, what cannot be done by increase of 
surface must be accomplished by frequency of action, and thence 
comes inflammation or disorganization. 
The narrow-chested Horse subject to Inflammation. —It is worse 
with the narrow-chested horse, who has scarcely capacity of 
the thorax sufficient for ordinary exertion; and who is not only 
deficient in that which gives the power of action to the muscular 
system, but in that system itself. Five out of six of those who 
perish from inflamed lungs are narrow-chested animals; and I 
would almost venture to affirm, that nine out of ten of those who 
are lost in the field, after a hard day’s run, are horses whose 
training has been neglected, or who have no room for the lungs 
to expand. We hence learn the most important of all points in 
the conformation of the horse. An elevated wither, or oblique 
shoulder, or powerful quarters, are great advantages; but that 
w hich is mosc of all connected with the general health of the 
animal, and with combined fleetness and bottom, is a deep -and 
broad and swelling chest. After all, however, the arch of the ribs 
i.s far less marked in all the mammalia than it is in man, and 
