His eyes differ from ours in having also a much wider angle of vision. One might compare our eyes to a brace of guns in the fore {157} barbette of a warship; and the horse's eyes to two guns thrown out on sponsons wide of the ship, so that they can be swung round to cover the whole horizon. See how the horse's head is raised so that his own body does not intercept his backward sight. See how the head widens to place the eyes as far apart as possible, while the skull tapers upwards to give him a clear view of the sky, and tapers downwards to give a clear view of the ground. There is nothing in the whole sphere of possible vision which the horse cannot see by lifting and lowering his head. The intention of the eyes, then, is not to see the distances ahead, but to scrutinize at close range all overhanging branches of the trees, the minutest details of surrounding bush, and most especially with microscopic detail everything underfoot. Everybody knows that the horse is clever in avoiding the earth heaps made by burrowing animals, but I think there is also reason to believe that he can distinguish by relative dampness or dryness, and plant growth of the soil those tunnels and chambers of badgers and other ground game which do not reach up to the surface. It is only at full gallop that he fails to see the surface indications of blind {158} burrows, and is apt to blunder into them with disastrous results both for himself and for his rider. But what has all this got to do with bitts? We must advance the argument to a further stage. [Sidenote: The slack rein] In the eighteenth century the Evangelist, Richard Wesley, rode on his preaching tours some seventy thousand miles on English highways. Because he could buy them cheap he always used stumbling horses. As he rode he would let the rein drop while he read the Bible, and presently would find the stumbler cured. There are some horses, he said, who will stumble over their own shadows, but nearly always a slack rein will cure them. Then one can sell them at a better price, and so make money to pay the expenses of travel. To prevent stumbling, the range man trains his horse to slack rein, and in this matter reverts to an old war practice. The steering of horses by the knee is most excellent horsemanship. Because I lacked the suppleness for steering by the knee it has been my practice to let the rein lie on the horse's neck. If any steering is needed, it is easy to have the two sides of the {159} rein tied in a half hitch, and, holding the knot between thumb and finger, to slap the rein on the side of the neck to show which way one is going.