facilities of human art.

A stage-coach toiling against this road of six degrees inclination,
and a flour-waggon traversing from side to side to lengthen the
hypotheneuse, yet stopping at every hundred yards to enable the horses
to recover their ordinary tone of breathing, proved the good policy of
that law in France, which would have lowered this road at the top full
thirty yards, and have extended the hypotheneuse three hundred and
sixty yards under the level road at the summit. If the barbarity of
the practice of tight-reining the heads of wretched horses needed any
exaggeration, its superlative absurdity was evidenced in the horses
which I saw labouring up this hill. Nature, which does nothing in
vain, had a final purpose in giving motion to the vertebrae that join
the head of an animal to the trunk. The moving head is, in truth, one
of the extremities of that compound animal lever, whose fulcrum is the
centre of gravity. The latter point is disturbed in its inertia, and
acquires progressive motion by the action of the extremities of the
lever, which are themselves moved by volition, whose seat is in the
cranium; and the head, in consequence, is in all instances the first
mover. The propulsion or vibration of the head puts the entire
muscular system in motion, disturbs the balance on the centre of
gravity, and so effects the sublime purposes of loco-motion in all
animals. Yet it is this prime mover which the greater brutes, who
profess themselves _knowing_ in the economy of horses, so tie up that
it can in no way exert itself; and then they whip and spur the animal
to force it to make new and unnatural exertions! Let any man, himself
an erect animal, the powers of whose _primum mobile_ are divided
between his head and his hands, cause his head to be so tied back and
fastened behind as to force out his chest. In that position let him
try his comparative powers in walking or running with speed and
safety, or in carrying or drawing a load, and he will soon be
convinced of the cruelty of the practice of tying up the head of a
horse for no other purpose than that he may _look_ bold and noble!
#Wesley# and #Bakewell#, who rode more than any men of their time,
told me that they had suffered from frequent falls, till, by attending
to the evident designs of nature, they suffered the bridle of their
horses to festoon in a semicircle; and since then, in riding thousands
of miles, they had never endured even the anxiety of a