AGRICULTUBE AND THE HORSE. 891 



his reputation as a stock-getter by starting too young; 

 and so ruined it, that even the success of his later years 

 has hardly redeemed it. Waxy and Melbourne and 

 Ion and Sir Hercules in England, and Black Hawk and 

 Messenger and Abdallah in America, sired many of 

 their best colts when they were twenty or more years 

 old. I bred a good two-year-old stallion once to six 

 good mares, and got six good-for-nothing colts. The 

 same stallion did fine service at ten. 



I would not breed from kickers or biters, or sullen 

 horses, or half-broken horses or mares, or from horses 

 and mares which have not been accustomed for gen- 

 erations to the work of civilized, useful, and practical 

 life. I would have the acquired faculties, which are 

 as sure to be transmitted as the natural ones, as good 

 and reliable as may be. 



If you will out-cross in breeding, be careful not to 

 bring animals together which are violently and diamet- 

 rically difierent from each other. The attempts to 

 cross the Arab upon American mares of Morgan and 

 Messenger blood, and the modern English thorough- 

 bred upon similar mares, have usually ended in 

 wretched failures. And not in this country alone is 

 this true : for when I asked a distinguished American 

 artist, long resident in Rome, why the thorough-bred 

 of England had not been introduced into Tuscany and 

 other parts of Italy to improve the breeds of horses 

 there, he replied, "It has been done; but the result 

 was a crop of weedy, leggy brutes of no value what- 



