The Arab is particularly attached to the horse: he rises with the sun, visits him, and laying his right hand on the horse’s face, he ejaculates the words (Bissim illah) In the name of God; he then kisses his hand, which is supposed to have received a benediction from the touch of the favourite animal of their Prophet Mohammed; he then has the place where the horse stands swept clean, some dry sand spread, and an arm full of straw trodden small by oxen, placed before him at such a distance, that he can by stretching out his neck just reach it (for the horse being picqueted, and fastened by ropes round the fetlock, cannot move from his place): this is done to lengthen the neck, and to strengthen the fore-hand by exertion; the length of neck is considered as a great perfection, so that when the Arabian jockies purchase a horse, they measure from the top of the shoulder to the tip of his nose; and then from the top of the shoulder, to the end of the fleshy part of the tail; if the length of the former exceed that of the latter, it is the criterion of a good horse; but if the latter half exceed the front half in length, the horse is considered of an inferior kind. Such a predilection have Mohammedans for ablution, that the best horses are sprinkled with water every morning on the chest, loins, and sexual parts; this, as they pretend, improves the strength of the animal, and promotes his health; at noon only he is watered; then he has a little more straw, and remains afterwards fasting till sun-set, when they feed him with a bag of barley, attached to his head like our hackney-coach horses: they reprobate Christians for feeding their horses in a manger, and observe, that when a horse is used to a manger, he will not eat out of a bag, and as mangers are not to be found in this country in travelling, the plausibility of preferring the bag is evident: they do not suffer him to eat any straw after the feed of barley, alleging, that it would destroy the good effect of the latter. The Arabs are expert farriers; their horses are generally healthy, but are subject to jaundice, which they cure by drawing the skin from the flesh at certain places with a pair of pinchers, and then piercing it with a hot iron like an awl. They turn them out to grass every spring during forty days, after which they physic them thus: they give them a pound of old butter, called budra,[70] which they mix with two ounces of pepper; they give this to the horse in a fluid state, that it may be the more easily swallowed; they then let him remain the whole day fasting, giving him in the evening only half of his accustomed quantity of barley; they next keep them without riding seven days: this process is said to secure the horse against disorders, and quickly takes off the prominent belly common after grass, disposing the flesh to the flanks.