76 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



— and if you are a moral man, you would not dare to sell her 

 at that price, — bred to a horse that is not worth fifty cents, 

 with the hope of getting a "Dexter" or a "Goldsmith Maid" ! 

 Just such wild dreams as that, I know from correspondence I 

 am receiving from all over New England, are being entertained 

 by young men. 



Now, the question is often asked me, "Which marks the 

 colt, the dam or the sire?" The Arabs have a maxim, that 

 "the foal follows the sire." It is ftishionable, I see, to laugh 

 at the Arabs. We caught the fashion throuofh the esfotisra of 

 the English thoroughbred breeders, who dislike to own that 

 their favorites originally sprung from, or could be potentially 

 bettered by, an infusion of Arabian blood, to any extent. It 

 is easy to laugh at the Arabs, to say that their horses are not 

 equal to the modern English thoroughbreds, and all that sort 

 of nonsense, which you see now floating through horse litera- 

 ture ; but, friends, I find on the old Egyptian tablets, that are 

 three thousand years of age, the image of the horse that is now 

 called the Kocklaui in Arabia, the princeliest of breeds there ; 

 the same horse, I say, that you see in Arabia, to-day, you find 

 engraved on Egyptian sculptures more than three thousand 

 years ago ; which means, that, for thirty-two hundred years, 

 the laws of breeding have not only been known, but kept; 

 not only were discovered, but have been actually taught and 

 obeyed to the letter. Now, then, a people, whether literate 

 or illiterate, must be wise in horse lore that can trace back 

 along a line of three thousand years of breeding so exact that 

 a strangely-colored hair has never come into the hide of one 

 of their horses ; so that a different-shaped nostril, a different 

 curvature of the eyebrow, has never yet been known in that 

 princely breed. When you go among a tribe of men who can 

 look back thirty centuries and not find a distinction in the 

 color of a hair, or in the arch-shape of the eyebrows, I tell 

 you you may sit down at the feet of those men as the wisest 

 teachers in the breeding of the horse the world knows. There- 

 fore, when I find that Arab proverb, "The foal follows the 

 sire," and find that my foals do not always follow the sire, I 

 say I must look deeper into this matter. Those men knew a 

 thousand times more than I do ; the knowledge out of which 

 that maxim came is not for me to question ; it is for me to 



