Demanding no perseverance

In maritime countries indeed he must have recourse to other expedients; he fishes in the stream, or among the rocks of the beach. In the woods he betakes himself to roots and wild honey; or he has a resource in the chase, an occupation, ever ready at hand, exciting, and demanding no perseverance. But when the savage finds himself inclosed in the continent and the wilderness, he draws the domestic animals about him, and constitutes himself the head of a sort of brute polity. He becomes a king and father of the beasts, and by the economical arrangements which this pretension involves, advances a first step, though a low one, in civilization, which the hunter or the fisher does not attain.

And here, beyond other animals, the horse is the instrument of that civilization. It enables him to govern and to guide his sheep and cattle; it carries him to the chase, when he is tempted to it; it transports him and his from place to place; while his very locomotion and shifting locationand independence of soil define tlie idea and secure the existence both of a household and of personal property. Nor is this all which this animal does for him; it is food both in its life and in its death; when dead, it nourishes him with its flesh, and while alive, it supplies its milk for an intoxicating liquor which, under the name of koumiss, has from time immemorial served the Tartar instead of wine or spirits.

The horse then is his friend under all circumstances, and inseparable from him; he maybe even said to live on horseback, he eats and sleeps without dismounting, till the fable has been current that he has a centaur’s nature, half man and half beast. Thus it was that the ancient Saxons had a horse for their ensign in war; thus it is that the Ottoman ordinances are, I believe, to this day dated from “ the imperial stirrup”, and the display of horsetails at the gate of the palace is the Ottoman signal of war. Thus too, as the Catholic ritual measures intervals by the Miserere, and St. Ignatius in his Exercises by the Pater Noster, so the Turcomans and the Usbeks speak familiarly of the time of a gallop.