[1918] Varro, ubi supra, gives considerably different directions on this point; he says, “Intercourse is to be allowed, at the proper season of the year, twice a day, morning and evening.”
[1919] This sentence in Columella, ubi supra, seems to illustrate the meaning, which is somewhat obscure. “Veruntamen nec minus quam quindecim, nec plures quam viginti, unus debet implere”—“One male ought to be coupled with not more than twenty females, nor less than fifteen.”
[1920] Cuvier states, that the hippomanes is a concretion occasionally found in the liquor amnii of the mare, and which it devours, from the same kind of instinctive feeling which causes quadrupeds generally to devour the afterbirth. He remarks, however, that this can have no connection with the attachment which the mother bears to her offspring; Ajasson, vol. vi. p. 459; Lemaire, vol. iii. p. 495. The hippomanes is said to have been employed by the sorceresses of antiquity, as an ingredient in their amatory potions. See Aristotle, Hist. Anim. B. viii. c. 24, and Ælian, Anim. Nat. B. xiv. c. 18.—B. See also B. xxviii. c. 11.
[1921] Now Lisbon. See B. iv. c. 35.
[1922] The accounts given, by Phœnician navigators, of the fertility of Lusitania, and the frequency of the mild western breezes, gave rise to the fable here mentioned, which has been generally received by the ancients; and that not merely by the poets, as Virgil, Geor. B. iii. l. 274, 275, but by practical writers, as Varro, B. ii. c. 1, and Columella, B. vi. c. 27. Justin, however, B. xliv. c. 3, attributes the opinion to the great size of the horses, and their remarkable fleetness, from which they were said to be the sons of the wind.—B.
[1923] The origin and meaning of this name is not known.—B.
[1924] Martial describes the peculiar short, quick step of the “asturco,” in one of his Epigrams, B. xiv. Ep. 199.—B.
[1925] “Alterno crurum explicatu glomeratio;” it would not be possible to give a literal translation, but we may judge of the meaning by the context.—B. He clearly alludes to a movement like our canter.
[1926] “Tolutim carpere incursus;” Hardouin explains this by a reference to Plautus, Asinaria, A. iii. sc. 3, l. 116. “Tolutim ni badizas”—“If you do not amble, lifting up your feet.”
[1927] Aristotle, Hist. Anim. B. viii. c. 24, gives an account of the diseases of horses.—B.