Don’t reverse the natural order of things. This expression no doubt dates from the time when horses first were used to draw wheeled vehicles, and began to be transferred to other affairs almost immediately. Cicero accused Homer of doing so, complaining that the Greek poet stated the moral of a story before telling the story. From the 1500s on, numerous English writers—Sir Thomas More, William Shakespeare, Charles Kingsley, to mention just a few—used this turn of phrase, which also appears in Greek, Latin, French, German, and Italian. In English it was a cliché by the 1700s.