Horses in warfare of today's English saddle. Both the Scythians and Assyrians used pads with added felt attached with a surcingle or girth around the horse's barrel for increased security and comfort. Xenophon mentioned the use of a padded cloth on cavalry mounts as early as the 4th century BC. The saddle with a solid framework, or "tree", provided a bearing surface to protect the horse from the weight of the rider, but was not widespread until the 2nd century AD. However, it made a critical difference, as horses could carry more weight when distributed across a solid saddle tree. A solid tree,
Girth (functional analysis) Girth (functional analysis) In functional analysis, the girth of a Banach space is the infimum of lengths of centrally symmetric simple closed curves in the unit sphere of the space. Equivalently, it is twice the infimum of distances between opposite points of the sphere, as measured within the sphere. Every finite-dimensional Banach space has a pair of opposite points on the unit sphere that achieves the minimum distance, and a centrally symmetric simple closed curve that achieves the minimum length. However, such a curve may not always exist in infinite-dimensional spaces. The girth is always at least four, because the