ON ROARING. 
61 
Roaring does not always materially injure the Horse ,—We 
must not, however, take it for granted that the roarer is never 
good for any thing. There are few hunts in which there is not a 
roarer who acquits himself very fairly in the field; and it has oc¬ 
casionally so happened that the roarer has been the very crack 
horse of the hunt; yet he must be ridden with judgment, and 
spared a little when going up hill. There is a village in the 
West Riding of Yorkshire, through which a band of smugglers 
used frequently to pass in the dead of night: the horse of the 
leader, and the best horse of the troop, and on which his owner 
would bid defiance to all pursuit, was so rank a roarer, that he 
could be heard at the distance of a quarter of a mile. The clat¬ 
ter of all the rest scarcely made so much noise as the roaring of 
the captain’s horse. When this got a little too bad, and he did 
not fear immediate pursuit, the smuggler used to halt the troop 
at some convenient hayrick on the roadside, and, having suf¬ 
fered the animal to distend his stomach with this dry food, as he 
was always ready enough to do, he would remount and gallop on, 
and, for a while, the roaring was scarcely heard. I am not com¬ 
pelled satisfactorily to account for this ; but the loaded stomach 
now pressing against the diaphragm, that muscle had harder 
work to displace the stomach in the act of enlarging the chest 
and producing an act of inspiration, and accomplished it more 
slowly, and therefore, the air taking longer time to rush by, the 
roaring was diminished. I will not stop to calculate what must 
have been the increased labour of the diaphragm in moving the 
loaded stomach, nor how much sooner the horse must have been 
exhausted. This did not enter into the owner’s reckoning, and 
probably the cruel application of whip and spur would deprive 
him of the means of forming a proper calculation of it. 
Eclipse was a ‘‘ high-blower.” He drew his breath hard, and 
with apparent difficulty. The upper air-passages, perhaps those 
of the head, did not correspond with his unusually capacious 
chest; yet he was never beaten. It is said that he never met with 
an antagonist fairly to put him to the top of his speed ; and that 
the actual effect of this disproportion in the two extremities of 
the respiratory apparatus was not thoroughly tested. 
Causes oj'Roaring .—Then roaring proceeds from obstruction 
in some portion of the respiratory canal, oftenest in the larynx, 
for there is least room to spare, that cartilaginous box being occu¬ 
pied by the mechanism of the voice; next in frequency it is in 
the trachea, but, in fact, obstruction any where will produce it. 
Mr. Blaine, quoting from the French journalists, says, that a 
piece of riband lodged within one of the nasal fossae produced 
roaring, and that even the displacement of a molar tooth has been 
