employed to ride and drive him without a bit in his mouth, but no invention or device of man could have compensated for the absence of his solid, hoof-cased foot. From the earliest ages, the attention of horsemen and horse-loving nations has been directed to the conservation or perfectioning of those attributes which make this everwilling slave so worthy of our admiration and gratitude; and those horses which had the best conformation, and proved themselves fleetest and hardiest, were ever selected as models for breeding and purchasing. And curiously enough, though it was not to be wondered at, nearly every one of the ancient writers, when speaking of the horse, centre their attention on his feet; no matter how beautifully formed the other points of his conformation may have been, if his feet were defective, all was bad. The excellent horseman and gallant soldier, Xenophon, to whose extant treatises on the horse we are indebted for so much of what we know of equestrian matters in the ancient world, tersely specifies how essential even in his day, when the uses of this animal were more limited, it was that he have good feet, or there was no profit in him. He says: 'In respect to the horse's body, then, we assert that we must first examine the feet; for as there would be no use in a house, though the upper parts were extremely beautiful, if the foundations were not laid as they ought to be, so there would be no profit in a war-horse, even if he had all his other parts excellent but was unsound in his feet; for then he would be unable to render any of his other good qualities effective.'[1]
And from the days of Xenophon to the present, when
- ↑ De Re Equestri.
