If the Doctor had known that Nobs was of Tartarian extraction, this fact would sufficiently have accounted for the excellences of that incomparable roadster. He explained them quite as satisfactorily to himself by the fancy which he amused himself with supporting on this occasion, that this marvellous horse was a son of the Wind. And hence he inferred that Nobs possessed the innate qualities of his kind in greater perfection than any other horse, as approaching nearer to the original perfection in which the species was created. For although animals are each in their kind less degenerate than man, whom so many circumstances have tended to injure in his physical nature, still, he argued, all which like the horse have been made subservient to the uses of man, were in some degree deteriorated by that subjection. Innate qualities, however, he admitted were more apparent in the brute creation than in the human creature, because even in those which suffer most by domestication, the course of nature is not so violently overruled. I except the Duck, he would say. That bird, which Nature hath made free of earth, air and water, loses by servitude the use of one element, the enjoyment of two, and the freedom of all three. Look at the Pig also, said the Doctor. In his wild state no animal is cleaner, happier, or better able to make himself respected. Look at him when tamed,—I will not say in a brawn-case, for I am not speaking now of those cruelties which the Devil and Man between them have devised,—but look at him prowling at large about the purlieus of his sty. What a loathsome poor despised creature hath man made him! _Animal propter convivia natum._[2] Every cur thinks itself privileged to take him by the ear; whereas if he were once more free in the woods, the stoutest mastiff or wolf-dog would not dare look him in the face. [Footnote 2: JUVENAL.] Yet he was fond of maintaining that the lower creation are capable of intellectual improvement. In Holland indeed he had seen the school for dogs, where poodles go through a regular course of education, and where by this time perhaps the Lancasterian inventions have been introduced. But this was not what the Doctor contemplated. Making bears and elephants dance, teaching dogs to enact ballets, and horses to exhibit tricks at a fair, he considered as the freaks of man's capricious cruelty, and instances of that abuse of power which he so frequently exercises over his inferior creatures, and for which he must one day render an account, together with all those whose countenance of such spectacles affords the temptation to exhibit them.