DR. LEGEAR'S STOCK BOOK. 9 



road purposes, having size, substance, good looks, good behavior 

 and speed, ordinary or great, and the more the better. My rea- 

 sons for this belief will be given very briefly: 



"Breeding has been almost totally abandoned for the past four 

 years, and it is estimated that there are not as many horses in the 

 United States in 1897 as there were in 1890 by about 2,000,000, 

 the decrease being proportionately much larger in the high 

 grades of horses than in the cheaper and less desirable ones. 



"Nothing but very high prices will stimulate the people to 

 start to breeding again; and, when they do start, the scarcity of 

 merchantable stock will be intensified by the number of mares 

 that will be withdrawn from ordinary use and put to breeding. 

 It will be at least six years after the breeding industry is well 

 under way again before the colts, resulting from such breeding, 

 will be old enough for general use. 



"In the meantime, there will be a great scarcity of horses, and 

 corresponding high prices. 



"The great decline in prices in 1893-96 was, to a great extent, 

 brought about by the fact that during the prosperous times, when 

 horses were very high, thousands of parties, without any practical 

 knowledge, rushed into the breeding business, using anything in 

 the line of stallions and mares that was ever remotely related to 

 anything that had trotted, paying no attention to size, good looks 

 or soundness. 



"In a great many instances, the stallions and mares upon so- 

 called trotting farms failed to produce more than 2 or 3 per cent 

 of horses that could be made to go in 2:30. Of course, this meant 

 ruin and disaster whenever this character of stock was forced 

 upon the market, as intelligent breeders would not buy them, 

 and to the general public they were of no more value than the 

 ordinary horses of the country. 



"This indiscriminate breeding of trotters that could not trot 

 and had very few other desirable qualities, very materially helped 

 to increase the number of horses in the United States from about 



