Everybody has heard of "humors flying about the horse." It is an old stable phrase, and still a great favorite. The horse is not well, yet he is not ill. There is always something wrong with him. One month he has swelled legs, another he has inflamed eyes, another he has some tumors about him, or some eruption on the skin, and so on all the year through. He is hardly cured of one disease till he is attacked by some other; and perhaps he never does any good till he changes hands, when he soon becomes an excellent horse, always ready for his food and for his work. This often happens. Plethora, repeatedly excited, is the cause.

The stabling, or the grooming, may have been bad; the horse unequally fed, or irregularly worked - some weeks half-starved, others surfeited to plethora - sometimes idle for a month, and sometimes over-worked for a month. He does better, indeed quite well, when he is properly worked and properly fed. The humors are blamed. According to the groom there is some bad humor flying about the horse. He gives his drugs to sweeten the blood, puts in rowels to drain off impurities, and plays numberless other tricks, such as ignorance alone could suggest. Little, in truth, is required but to get rid of that which plethora has already produced, and subsequently to give regularity to the work and to the feeding, and to proportion the one to the other.

* I ought sooner to have mentioned, that among stablemen plethora is anually termed foulness. The horse is said to be foul. I have rejected this me, because, in Scotland, a g.andered horse is termed foul.