THE CROUCH SEAT.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Volume XVII, Issue 993, 18 March 1909, Page 6

THE CROUCH SEAT.

The question as to whether the crouch is the most suitable seat for riding a playful racehorse, a bucking (mutetlang or (btrtrfmby, hardly merits discussion. A jockey’s business is to win races not to give demonstrations of rough riding- Like men in other

professions, he must be guided by science (says a correspondent of the London Sportsman), and this is altogether in favour of the crouch- The reasons for adopting it have passed the hypothetic stage, and are now as well supported by deductive arguments and facts as in Newton’s law of gravitation- It took more than a single generation to convince the world’s civilised inhabitants that their planet revolved round the sun, and it will take probably quite as long to convince many horsemen that the weakest part of a horse’s back is the centre, and that to place a load on the belly of a muscle under stimulation is a certain and sure method of tiring it rapidly; or to convince them that loss of momentum due to air pressure on moving bodies is a law in dynamics, which applies to race-riding; that a cone-shaped body with its apex to the wind offers only about threequarters of the resistance of the flat plate of the same sectional area at its base; and that the jockey who does not take advantage of the partial vacuum produced by the horse’s head and neck is maternally handicapped. Only in the very rare condition of a gale of 50 miles an hour or over blowing directly on his back would a jockey be justified in sitt.ng upright. But here the gain from the velocity of the wind over and above the rate of the horse’s progression would be somewhat discounted if the jockey sat too far back. The anatomy and physiology of the horse justify this assertion; the weight bearing capacity of the various pants of the spinal column, the attachments and functions of the longissimus dorsi muscle, and angles and curvatures of the ribs, the position and functions of the diaphragm, and other structures are involved in this question. In its full technical aspect it would, perhaps, prove too dull and uninteresting for your readers, and so I wili leave the subject.