270 MEADOWS AND PASTURES 



Animals and Pastures Rich in Lime. There are pas- 

 tures noted the world over for their splendid animals. 

 At Nogent-le-Rotrou in France I was sho\vn pastures on 

 which could be produced the most splendid types of 

 Percheron colts. These pastures were where they had 

 the river wash from the Huisne, a stream that breaks 

 through hills of soft limestone. These bottoms are doubt- 

 less very rich in lime and in phosphates too; they bear 

 splendid thick grass, and colts grazing on them will 

 make marvelous development, while if they w^ere pas- 

 tured on the sandstone soils a mile away they would 

 make only common work horses with no hope of coming 

 to America as founders of a new race. In England it 

 has long been recognized that pastures rich in lime and 

 phosphorus made the best race horses and the best bone 

 in drafters. So much is this believed that breeders there 

 do not hesitate to go to great lengths artificially to lime 

 pastures devoted to mares and colts of royal blood. There 

 carbonate of lime in the shape of chalk is commonly 

 used, though more or less burned lime is also applied and 

 very much lime in combination with phosphorus in the 

 form of basic slag. In our own land we have the ex- 

 ample of Kentucky sending out a steady stream of splen- 

 did colts, bulls, sheep and men from that central region 

 where the rich limestone lay near the surface, and where 

 their decay has left the land rich in both limestone and 

 phosphorus. There are other regions nearly as notable, 

 and many a failure has been recorded where men have 

 taken good animals to soils deficient in lime and sought 

 to breed young things as good as their sires and dams. 

 Without exception, if they depended on the herbage of 



