“I must own myself a very decided advocate for the clipping of hunters, having observed such horses to have had a most decided advantage, during the last season, with the Cheshire, Sir Richard Puleston’s and Sir Thomas Stanley’s fox-hounds, as well as with the Chester harriers, now under the very superior management of Captain Puleston. Experience and observation are, in this matter, worth a bushel of _à priori_ reasoning; but scientific argument and rational explanation are not wanting to aid and enforce the practice of clipping. In the first place and to begin with the most trifling reason—the horse is a pound lighter; and the coat affording little resistance to the brush, your groom is not half so soon fatigued in dressing, and lays double strength upon the surface. This causes a greater determination to the extreme vessels, and the insensible perspiration is proportionably increased. We invariably find a connexion between the action of the skin and that of the intestines; and this is sufficiently evident in a well-groomed horse; the lacteals of the bowels seem to have a corresponding action communicated to them—they absorb and select the pabulum of the blood with increased vigour—the secreting vessels of the stomach furnish the gastric solvent more abundantly—the liver more readily acts, and separates those vitiated parts which have fulfilled their duties in the circulation, and require to be thrown out of the system, but in their transit, in the form of bile, perform other important uses, in stimulating the intestines to that regular peristaltic motion which secures a change of particles to the vessels which absorb the nourishment for the blood. But the abdominal viscera do not alone benefit by the more intimate friction which is admitted to the skin of a clipped horse. The lungs are wonderfully assisted the more the insensible perspiration is increased: the less work for them to accomplish, the less will be the determination to the internal vessels; and consequently the less risk of congestion in the minute bronchial ramifications of the lungs.” * * * * *