NOTE 4.—I think the _great_ horses must be an error, though running through all the texts, and that _grant quantité de chevaus_ was probably intended. Valuable _ponies_ are produced in those regions, but I have never heard of large horses, and Martini’s testimony is to like effect (p. 141). Nor can I hear of any race in those regions in modern times that uses what we should call long stirrups. It is true that the Tartars rode _very short_—“_brevissimas habent strepas_,” as Carpini says (643); and the Kirghiz Kazaks now do the same. Both Burmese and Shans ride what we should call short; and Major Sladen observes of the people on the western border of Yun-nan: “Kachyens and Shans ride on ordinary Chinese saddles. The stirrups are of the usual average length, but the saddles are so constructed as to rise at least a foot above the pony’s back.” He adds with reference to another point in the text: “I noticed a few Shan ponies _with docked tails_. But the more general practice is to loop up the tail in a knot, the object being to protect the rider, or rather his clothes, from the dirt with which they would otherwise be spattered from the flipping of the animal’s tail.” (_MS. Notes._) [After Yung-ch’ang, Captain Gill writes (II. p. 356): “The manes were hogged and the tails cropped of a great many of the ponies these men were riding; but there were none of the docked tails mentioned by Marco Polo.”—H. C.] Armour of boiled leather—“_armes cuiracés de cuir bouilli_”; so Pauthier’s text; the material so often mentioned in mediæval costume; _e.g._ in the leggings of Sir Thopas:— “His jambeux were of cuirbouly, His swerdës sheth of ivory, His helme of latoun bright.” But the reading of the G. Text which is “_cuir de bufal_,” is probably the right one. Some of the Miau-tzŭ of Kweichau are described as wearing armour of buffalo-leather overlaid with iron plates. (_Ritter_, IV. 768–776.) Arblasts or crossbows are still characteristic weapons of many of the wilder tribes of this region; _e.g._ of some of the Singphos, of the Mishmis of Upper Assam, of the Lu-tzŭ of the valley of the Lukiang, of tribes of the hills of Laos, of the Stiens of Cambodia, and of several of the Miau-tzŭ tribes of the interior of China. We give a cut copied from a Chinese work on the Miau-tzŭ of Kweichau in Dr. Lockhart’s possession, which shows _three_ little men of the Sang-Miau tribe of Kweichau combining to mend a crossbow, and a chief with _armes cuiracés_ and _jambeux_ also. [The cut (p. 83) is well explained by this passage of _Baber’s Travels_ among the Lolos (p. 71): “They make their own swords, three and a half to five spans long, with square heads, and have bows which it takes three men to draw, but no muskets.”—H. C.]