The principles of feeding are facts which influence and ought to regulate the practice of feeding. The word feeding refers to the manger-food, given at intervals, not to the hay or fodder, which is almost constantly within the horse's reach.

People who are unacquainted with stable affairs make many blunders in the management of their horses, and particularly in feeding them. They reason too much from analogy. The rules which regulate their own diet are applied to that of the horse. Medical men are remarkable for this. A skilful surgeon expressed his conviction, that stablemen are full of error and prejudice regarding the diet of horses. He said : ' I order my patients to live on plain food, on that which does not tempt excess; and I tell them to eat when they are hungry, and to desist when satisfied. It is thus I treat my horse," continued he; "I give him plain wholesome food, as much as he likes, and when he likes."

This is sufficiently absurd; it is a common way of speaking only with the ignorant. It might be a very good rule, if there were no food for the horse but grass, and none for man but bread. Horses may eat more grain, and men more beef than their work requires; or the plain, wholesome nourishment, as it is called, may not suffice for certain kinds of work. It is this, it is the work which renders care and system so necessary in the feeding of horses. Men have to work, too, but very few have labor bearing any resemblance to that of the horse, and those few are compelled to regulate their diet by rules which are not known to the bulk of mankind. The diver, the boxer, the runner, and the wrestler, must not live like other men. The fermentable nature of the horse's food, and the peculiar structure of his stomach which forbids vomition, and the abstinence from food and drink occasionally required by the work, are other circumstances which demand particular attention to the mode of feeding.

Slow Work aids digestion, empties the bowels and sharpens the appetite. Hence it happens that on Sunday night and Monday morning there are more cases of colic and founder than during any other part of the week. Horses that never want an appetite ought not to have an unlimited allowance of hay on Sunday; they have time to eat a great deal more than they need, and the torpid state of the stomach and bowels produced by a day of idleness, renders an additional quantity very dangerous.

By slow work, I mean that which is performed at a walk, not that which hurries the breathing, or produces copious perspiration. The moderate exertion of which I speak does not, as some might suppose, interfere with the digestive process. It is attended with some waste; there is some expenditure of nutriment, and that seems to excite activity in the digestive apparatus for the purpose of replacing the loss. Farm and cart-horses are fed immediately before commencing their labor, and the appetite with which they return shows that the stomach is not full; but: