72 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Jan. 



lean and bony outline and make-up which we designate as 

 belonging to the nervous temperament. It has a remarkable 

 effect upon the construction of the bones. Look at the 

 picture of a Hereford heifer. She is as thorough a thorough- 

 bred as the Guernsey or Hoi stein ; yet, if you could 

 analyze her bones, you would find them of a totally different 

 make, and varying in a manner highly instructive to you as 

 you put them under the microscope. Let me give you an 

 illustration. Two thousand years ago an old Arab said, 

 " Form is everything to purpose." Now, he had a distinct 

 purpose in his mind in breeding, and that was to produce a 

 horse that would carry his rider over the sand of the Sahara, 

 fetlock deep, twenty miles, and never break his gallop, and 

 then carry him forty miles more. The Arabian horse is not 

 so swift as the thoroughbred English race- horse for a short 

 distance, but he has tremendous staying power. Where 

 does he get it? In the first place, he is rightly built in the 

 bones. At a lecture that I attended some twenty-five years 

 ago, given by an English surgeon, he gave a very fine illus- 

 tration of the difference of the effect of breeding upon bone. 

 He had two inches of the bono between the gambrel and the 

 fetlock joint of a thoroughbred Kentucky race-horse, and a 

 corresponding piece of bone from a Conestoga draft-horse, 

 weighing nineteen hundred pounds. The appearance of a 

 cross-section of those two bones as I looked at them was full 

 of instruction. The Conestoga draft-horse bone was nearly 

 a third larger than that of the race-horse, yet the race horse 

 bone weighed the most; and the lecturer told me that the 

 bones of that race-horse were stronger when he was in life 

 than any two pieces of steel of similar size that could be 

 forged. I said, " Doctor, can that be possible?" "Yes," 

 said he; "I will prove it to you. His weight was nine 

 hundred and fifty pounds ; his average leap was twenty feet; 

 and when in life those two bones sustained the shock of pro- 

 jecting nine hundred and fifty pounds twenty feet at a throw 

 for a mile. Could any two pieces of steel of similar size 

 have endured the strain, had they been put in place of the 

 bones?" Here, my friends, we see the marvelous wisdom 

 that has attended the long line of intellect and judgment 

 from the Arab down to the man who is breeding that I\orse 



