Coeur de Lion, is thus accurately described by the importer of the Percherons into New Jersey: "They average," he says, and we are personally cognizant of his accuracy, "full sixteen hands in height, with head short, thick; wide and hollow between the eyes; jaws heavy; ears short, and pointed well forward; neck very short and thick; mane heavy; shoulder well inclined backward; back extremely short; rump steep; quarters very broad; chest wide and deep; tendons large; muscles excessively developed; legs short, particularly from the knee and hock to the fetlock, and thence to the coronet, which is covered with long hair, covering half the hoof; much hair on the legs." It was soon found even while complete armor was in use, that these enormous, bony Normans, which are still though deteriorated the ordinary, heavy draught horses of France, had not sufficient speed to render the cavalry charge effective, or sufficient blood to give spirit adequate to the endurance of long-continued toil. The Andalusian horse, which in its highest form, was a pure barb of Morocco, imported into Spain by the Saracen Moors under Tarik, who has left his name to the rock of Gibraltar, and in its secondary form, a half-bred horse, between the African barbs and the old Spanish horse, which had long before received a large tincture of Oriental blood from the Numidian chargers of the Carthagenians, who so long occupied that country, proved, in its unmixed state, too light for the enormous weight of a caparisoned man-at-arms, or, if occasionally equal to that weight, too costly to be within the means of any but crowned heads. "The bone and muscle," observes the same writer we have before quoted, "and much of the form of the Percheron, come from this horse"—that is, from the old Norman war-horse previously described; "and he gets his spirit and action from the Andalusian. Docility comes from both sides. On the
