No. 6. DEPARTMENT OF AGUICULTURE. 315 



horse of a particular breed under any circumstances. Now that 

 is the kind of breed sentiments that I would like to break down. 

 Partisan spirit is a good thing, competition makes for liealthy 

 rivalry that gets good results. But when a man is so i)artisan that 

 he will take a position of that sort, he is not an intelligent, con- 

 structive breeder and he has missed the fundamental essential; and 

 that is what I am trying to emphasize. On the other hand I have 

 heard men say that breed didn't count very much, didn't figure 

 much with them, they wanted to breed to the good horse. Now 

 there are good horses in every breed, and that man's position is 

 much more tenable than the position of the other two men, unless 

 it be qualified by certain local conditions which affect the different 

 breeds, I would always rather breed to the best horse, irrespective 

 of his breed, than take a stand that I would not breed to a horse 

 of one breed or to a horse of any other breed. 



What are the distinctive characters, which are the things that 

 distinguish one group from another, the result of certain agencies 

 that have been transmitted in tlie history of the breed and which they 

 themselves are going to transmit to future generations of this 

 breed? They are the things that have to work out of the breed; 

 they are working out to produce a certain class of market horses. 

 The buyer, nine times out of ten, pays no attention to breed, he 

 buys on contract, he has certain specifications to meet. Maybe 

 when he gets his carload of horses together, you and I who know 

 breed will go over them and say they are all Belgians or Percherons. 

 How does it happen that they are so uniform? Because he has 

 been after a certain type of horse and the specifications he was 

 trying to meet have been the specifications that were most in line 

 with the distinctive characters of this particular breed, and as a 

 natural matter of course, the horses he got together will be of that 

 breed ; nine times out of ten that is about as much a figure as breed 

 cuts with the ordinary buyer. But say we want to fulfill a contract 

 or a near market demands a certain kind of horse and we are 

 laying our lines to produce it in the future; that is the time to 

 look at the breed in a non-partisan intelligent way. 



There are certain horse characteristics we want to produce in 

 future generations and you cannot get anything out of a breed that 

 has not been put there' any more than you can get an element of 

 plant food out of your soil that has not been put there if it 

 was not there in the beginning; and yet I have known lots of 

 horse breeders who were endeavoring to get something out of their 

 breed of horses that had never been put there and the reason they 

 did it was that they did not know what had been put in and, there- 

 fore, did not know what they could get out and were getting a 

 good many things they did not expect and could not account for 

 and were failing to get a good mnny things they had set out to ^et. 

 Now T say that the distinctive characters are the result of definite 

 agencies that have been operating all down through the history 

 of this breed, and you can put them in three groups: First, every- 

 thing that comes in the line of foundation stock, original blood. 

 Some breeds owe almost all their distinctive characters to the blood 

 on which that breed was founded. The original stock has been 

 very little altered as it has been bred on down in generation after 

 generation. Tn the second place, we may have the operation of 



