108 THE TERFECT HORSE. 



buy an uneasy, fretful, and fractious thing. It is uncer- 

 tain and dangerous business to train and teach such an 

 animal. There is too much risk about it. Nothing ad- 

 vertises a family of colts so badly as viciousness, or 

 that fickleness, or irritability of temper, bordering close 

 upon it. Seeing that this matter is clearly within one's 

 control, I hold that it is a high misdemeanor in a 

 breeder to breed a vicious colt. He has no right to 

 introduce a force into the world which man cannot 

 easily and safely manage. 



But, if one has no right to breed to a vicious stallion, 

 neither is it wise for him to breed to one when he is in 

 an artificial state. I will explain this more fully. 

 When life is propagated in the animal kingdom, the life 

 produced is the product of the union of two lives, and 

 takes its character from the character of the parental 

 source. The foal is a representative of the sire and 

 dam both, and of the sire and dam, not as they might 

 have been, but as they actually were at the time of 

 its conception. Not alone the general health of the 

 two parents is transmitted to the offspring, but the par- 

 ticular habit and mood of life in which they then were. 

 The nervous and temperamental states and conditions 

 were transmitted also. Hence it comes about, that as, in 

 the case of human species, the babe conceived in drunk- 

 enness is apt to be idiotic, and in other respects imbecile ; 

 so the foal conceived when the sire and dam, or either, 

 were in an unnatural, excited, feverish state, will come 

 into the world sensibly affected and weakened from 



