320 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE OflE. Doc. 



those that range around a ton, have got a dash of Shire in them, the 

 majority on the dam side. James Johnson calls attention to the 

 fact that a gieat deal of the credit that ought to be going to Shire 

 horses because the Shire blood comes through the dam side is being 

 given to Percheron and Belgian and Clydesdale horses because they 

 happen to be the sires of these horses, and yet anybody can go back 

 and read Shire blood that came through the dam side, and if we 

 knew more about them, we would be attaching more importance to 

 the Shire blood in their ancestors, so dont' turn against a Shire sim- 

 ply because he is a Shire. 



I will show you the pictures of two breeds that represent prac- 

 tically the same foundation stock and almost the same conditions of 

 environment, but two extremely different ideals on the part of their 

 breeders. Here is a representative Clydesdale. If you want scale, 

 bone, extreme draftiness and all those things, don't go to the Clydes- 

 dale for it, the Scotchman's idea of the draft-horse is a horse that 

 can go away with a straight, friction-less, springy stride with con- 

 siderable length. That is fundamental to the draft horse. The Eng- 

 lishman's idea of a draft horse is grossness, hulk, bulk, scale, and he 

 sacrifices anything else to get it. In order to get this straight 

 stride that the Scotchman is so insistent upon, the horse would be 

 longer legged to give him more freedom of stride and will have to 

 have a little more range in body. Also, it won't be as thick, because, 

 by the law of correllation a short horse, short in legs is short all over, 

 and a long horse long in legs, is long all over, but he would rather 

 have him a little narow and go straight than have a wide front and 

 roll as these great big massive horses dp, and then he wants him to 

 hit the ground in a springy fashion and go with his hocks under him 

 and close together, therefore he has a hind leg that is set more accu- 

 rately ; there is more mechanical perfection in the hind leg of a Clyde 

 horse than any other horse. 



I will show you some grades gotten by horses of these different 

 breeds, and from them you can gain some idea of how their heredi- 

 tary characters are transmitted. Here is a great Clydesdale; this is 

 not characteristic of the breed; some of the Clydes carry the slope 

 of the pasterns to too great an extent. Here is a horse that stands a 

 little low on his knees and he has a foot that is alleged to be repre- 

 sentative of this breed, and the feature of his foot, the worst one, is 

 the one that is usually mentioned last, but you see here that same 

 lofty carriage of head and neck; the neck has some space to it, so 

 there is place for a shoulder. We have a pair of Clydes here in har- 

 ness, showing the same general character. See how they stand on 

 their pasterns, how springy they are, how their hocks are close to- 

 gether how straight they are. That is a long length of neck they 

 have got in front of the collar. A Scotch collar like that will cover 

 up almost the neck of some draft horses, and you can see by the way 

 they stand that they will go off in that snappy, springy easy stride 

 that the Scotchman is so insistent upon. Here is a stallion of a 

 breed more familiar to us. I don't know that you noticed it on Mr. 

 Dinsmore's chart, but there are more Percheron horses in this coun- 

 try than all other breeds combined, and more in this State than all 

 others; they outnumber the other breeds three to one, on an average. 

 Of course that is the real reason why Mr. Dinsmore got together the 

 figures I showed you first, but he introduced incidentally the other 

 figures which meant more to us at the time. Here is a breed that 



