Mr. William Youatt was a voluminous writer on domestic animals, and at one time was looked upon as the highest authority on the horse, both in England and in this country. He seems to have been a practitioner of veterinary surgery, and from the number of volumes which he published successfully, he must have been a man of ability and education. There can be no question that he knew a great deal—quite too much to know anything well. The first edition of his work on the horse was published in 1831, and soon after its appearance several publishing houses in this country seized upon it as very valuable, and each one of them soon had an edition of it before the public. It purports to have been written at the instance of “The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.” This declaration was a good thing, in a commercial view, and no doubt it did much in extending the circulation of the book. Without tarrying to note several minor historical blunders, I will go direct to one relating to the gait of the horse, which is now under consideration. In his fourth edition, page 535, he incidentally discusses the mechanism of the pace, and after speaking of the Elgin Marbles, to which I have referred at the beginning of this chapter, and after conceding that two of the four horses are not galloping but pacing, he says: “Whether this was then the mode of trotting or not, it is certain that it is never seen to occur in nature in the present day; and, indeed, it appears quite inconsistent with the necessary balancing of the body, and was, therefore, more probably an error of the artist.”