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fleshy legs, and bulky ill-shaped heads. A reserve of grass, where keep 

 is no more than sulHcient for the stoek, is a useful precaution, and 

 more especially in the case of early foals. 



It is singular, how long the most useful, and one would suppose, 

 obvious principles and practices, are making their way in the world. I 

 have somewhere before alluded to the practice of the Irish, and I 

 believe the Scots, using their Horses and oxen to draw the ploughs and 

 harrows by the tail. I really took the thing for a hoax, but they say 

 it was literally fact, and that the practice could only be, and really was 

 prevented by an act of parliament. So lately as Blundeville'sdays, it 

 was still supposed the best practice, to turn the covering stallion loose, 

 with his destined herd of mares, into well-fenced inclosures. The 

 assurance that by such means, there would be no barren mares, and a 

 saving of the expence of hard meat to the stallions, were supposed deci- 

 sive advantages; The vastly greater number of mares, which niioht 

 Avith equal effect and superior safety, be covered by the stallion in hand, 

 then sometimes practised, Avere ideas in embryo, unborn, or not even 

 conceived. The author above cited, talks of a young and lusty Horse, 

 covering nine or ten mares in a season: what would he have thought 

 of the soundness of their head-pieces, who would suffer their mares to 

 assist in making up the round dozen, covered by the same Horse, in 

 one day, could he have foretold, that such would be the case in the 

 nineteenth century ? Aristotle allowed the Horse thirty mares. In an 

 ancient stud of thirty thousand mares, in Syria, a stallion was allotted 

 to every hundred mares. 



I shall not be expected here to enter with much minuteness of detail, 

 into the science of propagatin*' varieties; as much of it will be sufficient, 

 as may contribute to general use. The grand princi])le and dependance 

 in breeding animals is, as we moderns phrase it, ' that like produces like;' 

 in the language of Blundeville's days, for the axiom was acknowledo-ed 

 centuries before Bakewell's time; ' most commonUe such sire and damme 

 such colt: Every experienced person has witnessed, that such is suffi- 

 ciently regular of occurrence, to establish a general rule, Avhich every 

 such one is aware, from the nature of things, cannot subsist without its 

 exceptions, against which there is no precaution or remedy. Of like 



Q 2 producing 



