Permit me to observe that the Horse is an animal, which, from the
earliest ages of the world, has been destined to the pleasure and
services of Man; the various and noble qualities with which nature has
endowed him sufficiently speaking the ends for which he was designed.
Mankind were not long before they were acquainted with them, and found
the means of applying them to the purposes for which they were given:
this is apparent from the Histories and traditions of almost all
nations, even from times the most remote; insomuch that many nations and
tribes, or colonies of people, who were entirely ignorant, or had but
very imperfect notions, of other improvements and arts of life; and even
at this day[3-*] are unacquainted with them, yet saw and understood the
generous properties of this creature in so strong a light as to treat
him with fondness and the greatest attention, sufficiently to declare
the high opinion they entertained of his merit and excellence; nay in
various regions, and in the most distant ages, were so far from being
strangers to the many services of which the Horse was capable, as to
have left rules and precepts concerning them, which are so true and
just, that they have been adopted by their successors; and as all art is
progressive, and receives additions and improvements in its course, as
the sagacity of man at different times, or chance and other causes
happen and concur: so that having the Ancient's foundation to erect our
building, it is natural to suppose that the structure has received many
beauties and improvements from the experience and refinement of latter
times.
It is generally supposed that the first service in which the Horse was
employed, was to assist mankind in making war, or in the pleasures and
occupations of the chase. _Xenophon_, who wrote three hundred years
before the Birth of _Christ_, says, in an express treatise which he
wrote on Horsemanship, that Cyrus hunted on Horseback, when he had a
mind to exercise himself and horses.
Herodotus speaks of hunting on Horseback as an exercise used in the time
of _Darius_, and it is probably of much earlier date. He particulatly[+]
mentions a fall which Darius had from his horse in hunting, by which he
dislocated his heel: these and thousands of quotations more, which might
be produced as proofs of the utility of the Horse, in remote ages, are
truths so indisputably attested that to enlarge farther upon it would be
a superfluous labour, and foreign to my present undertaking.