In the very early times Thessalian horses were used largely for charioteering. Allusion is made repeatedly in the classics to these Thessalian animals, stress being laid upon their symmetry, or what to-day we should term their make and shape. The mythical mares of King Diomed of Thrace, the tyrant whose grim humour, we are told, led him to feed his horses on the strangers who visited his kingdom, were alleged to be of the breed of Thessaly, a statement made indirectly in the description of Hercules' conquest of the tyrant and his subsequent “casting of the tyrant's quivering carcass to his own horses to be devoured.” Spenser alludes to this incident in the fifth book of his “Faerie Queene,” in the following lines:— “Like to the Thracian tyrant who, they say, Unto his horses gave his guests for meat, Till he himself was made their greedy prey, And torn to pieces by Alcides great.” Other mythical horses of the Thessalian breed were those of Achilles, of Rhesus, and of Orestes in Sophocles' stirring description of the race in _Electra_. It seems safe to say that until about the fourth century B.C. the Romans also did not use saddles, at least saddles with trees. That somewhere about this period, however, they began to adopt what we should call to-day saddlecloths, and that these were kept in place by a strap or bandage in the nature of a girth that passed beneath the belly, appears to be certain. For some unknown reason this girth is more often than not omitted on the works of art that represent horses of that period. Some of the animals of the Parthenon frieze lead us to believe that on occasions horses were still made to crouch when about to be mounted, though it is not probable they crouched voluntarily, as Bucephalus did. From impressions on the Parthenon frieze we may also conclude that the mounting block was not unknown in the centuries before Christ. A good idea of the exact stamp of horse harnessed to the war chariots of those centuries may be obtained by inspecting the bronze horse of the quadriga from the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the date of the Mausoleum being 331-341 B.C.—the building took ten years to erect. This bronze is to be seen in the British Museum. Hannibal's must have been the army the best provided with cavalry down to the year 218 B.C., for in that year Hannibal advanced into Italy with no less than 90,000 foot and some 12,000 horse, many of the latter being native horses mounted by Numidians who persisted still in scorning to use either saddle or bridle, though the cavalry division, which consisted of Spaniards, employed bridles of an elaborate pattern. How wholly superior Hannibal's cavalry proved to be to the Gallic horsemen placed by Scipio in the front line of his javelin throwers is well known to students of history. Indeed it was said that Hannibal's horsemen were superior even to the Italian and the Roman cavalry, which was high praise. * * * * *