NOTES ON THE HISTORY OF HORSE-SHOEING. 469 
sertion of devout Moslems. A horseshoe most likely it was ; but 
how an uncle of Mohammed should possess horses when the Beni 
Koreish, as a tribe, were without, and the Prophet himself, in the 
beginning of his career, had only three, is quite another question. 
Notwithstanding Beckman’s conclusions, we must continue to 
believe the practice much more ancient, and view his admitted 
thorough knowledge of the passages wherein the ancients allude to 
them to have been strangely misinterpreted : even the great por¬ 
tion of a horseshoe found in the tomb of Childeric, a Frankish 
king, buried at Tournay, in Belgium, about A.D. 481, being set 
aside, upon the pretext that it may have served for a mule, fur¬ 
nishes a striking example of the extent to which men will abuse 
the reasoning faculty when once blinded by a foregone conclusion. 
Surely horses would be shod where mules are admitted to have 
been so; and all persons acquainted with the prejudices of the past 
ages, must be aware that, instead of honouring a royal funeral in 
pagan Europe by burying a mule with the king, it would have 
been a flagrant insult*. 
After the arrival of the Sarmatian riding tribes, the whole of 
northern Europe became the land of horsemen. Dignity was 
seated on horseback. Priests and the southern tribes alone would 
be seen on mules. The feeling, therefore, of contempt for a soldier 
mounted on less than a horse was, and still is, general. When 
the old Colonel von Schlammersdorf, brought up in the Prussian 
cavalry, was marching, at the head of the Loewenstein Rifles, up 
the steep hills of St. Lucia, then attacked by Sir Ralph Abercrombie, 
there being no horses with the expedition as yet landed, the Gene¬ 
ral kindly sent him a mule, he himself riding another; but the 
sturdy old warrior, toiling in his heavy boots, gruffly replied that 
he did not “ ride donkiest.” 
In the vicinity of Tomsk, on the Upper Obi, far towards the 
high land of central Asia, there are scattered a great number of 
tumuli, which for centuries had occasionally furnished rich spoils 
to the Calmuck Tartars, the present tenants of the soil. The 
Russian government at length sent officers to examine those that 
* The figure of the shoe, and many golden regalia, together with golden 
bees, ox heads and coins, or ornaments of horse trappings, were found in the 
tombs at the same time. They were published in Keysler, and repeated in 
Montfaucon, Monarchic Fran^aise. In Scandinavia horseshoes were known 
certainly before the Norman Conquest of England, since the figure of one is 
struck on a Swedish coin without inscription, and, therefore, older than the 
use of Runic letters on medals. 
t There is, perhaps, only one instance extant of an armed warrior riding a 
mule bedecked with military caparisons, and that is found in the cathedral at 
Florence, where a Commander of the house of Farnese is so represented on 
his cenotaph, placed above a door. 
VOL. XXII. * 3q 
