Stables have been in use for several hundred years. It might be expected that the experience of so many genera-tions would have rendered them perfect. They are better than they were some years ago. Many of modern erection have few faults. They are spacious, light, well-aired, dry, and comfortable. This, however, is not the character of stables in general. The majority have been built with little regard to the comfort and health of the horse. Most of them are too small, too dark, and too close, or too open. Some are mere dungeons, so destitute of every convenience that no man of respectability [or ordinary humanity] would willingly make them the abode of his horses.

Stable architects have not much to boast of. When left to themselves they seem to think of little beyond shelter and confinement. If the weather be kept out, and the horse kept in, the stable is sufficient. If light and air be demanded, the doorway will admit them, and other apertures are superfluous; if the horse have room to stand, it matters little though he have none to lie; and if he get into the stable, it is of no consequence though his loins be sprained, or his haunches broken, in going out of it.

Bad stables, it is true, are not equally pernicious to all kinds of horses. Those that have little work suffer much mismanagement before they are injured. But those in constant and laborious employment must have good lodgings. Where the stables are bad, the management is seldom good, and it can not be of the best kind. It is no exaggeration to say, that hundreds of coaching-horses, and others employed at similar work, are destroyed every year by the combined influence of bad stables and bad stable management. Excessive toil and bad food have much to do in the work of destruction; but every hostile agent operates with most force where the stables are of the worst kind; and several causes of disease can operate nowhere else.