386 AGRICULTURE AND THE HORSE. 



their veins the blood of the Messenger, the Abdallah, 

 the Black Hawk, Lady Forest, and the best of the 

 Great Unknown ; but what a diverse family I had from 

 them! And yet this is horse-breeding, whenever you 

 leave the commonplace work of breeding slow and 

 phlegmatic cart-horses, and advance into those regions 

 where the highest attributes of the horse must be re- 

 produced in order to secure that animal which can dis- 

 tinguish himself on the track or road. And this seems 

 to be Nature's law. The production of all the lower 

 order of animals, or of all the lower grades of any race, 

 however high it may be, is not easily driven out of the 

 channels laid down for it by the generally-recognized 

 rule. A pound of beef or a pound of pork can be as 

 easily produced as can a bushel of wheat or corn. Not 

 so, however, the finer qualities to which the flesh is 

 obedient, and which will triumph in spite of physical 

 defect or deformity or weakness ; as the " gallant 

 Gray " laid down his life in the " Trosachs' rugged 

 jaws; " and as "the evergreen, live-oak, old Top-gallant, 

 in his twenty-fourth year," and "spavined in both 

 legs," rushed in and won three-mile races against the 

 best horses of his day, and laughed at his ten-year-old 

 companions, who, with their feeble spirits, were " stag- 

 gering about, over-kneed, and twisted up, and knuckled 

 behind," and were waiting only for the end of an 

 ignoble career. Not only is it almost impossible to 

 transmit this ethereal spirit, in its precise quality and 

 quantity, from generation to generation, but it is 



