VARIETIES OF THE HORSE. 35 



Try to breed a hack from a hack mare, and a coach-horse 

 may be the unsatisfactory result of your experiment. On 

 the other hand, I have known, and still know, a hunting 

 mare, who, with a variety of mates, persists in presenting 

 to her persevering owner a succession of small covert 

 hacks. Some day I firmly expect that she will astonish 

 him with a London cabriolet horse. The lower we go 

 in the scale of breeding the more uncertain is the result, 

 until the actual cart-horse is arrived at, and there the 

 result is easier to be calculated on. The only sort of 

 horse which has through ages preserved its distinctive 

 type is that which is supposed to be the progenitor of all 

 others, viz., the Arab, whose merits we may now proceed 

 to discuss, as he is an acknowledged ancestor founder, 

 in fact, of the family of our race-horses, and conse- 

 quently, as remarked above, of our superior hunters, 

 hacks, chargers, and light harness horses. The Arab has 

 been talked and written about very frequently ; but the 

 number of his historians who know anything about him is 

 indeed in a minority, as compared with the hosts who 

 have alternately maligned and over-praised him ; for he 

 is not quite perfection, and I have yet to see the animal 

 that is. Most people who have given the Arab horses a 

 thought know that there are several varieties even of 

 them ; but what these are is a hazy matter of conjecture 

 with many who might know better. The knowledge 

 would profit very few people, and for common purposes it 

 is enough to know that the Nedjedean horse is to be con- 

 sidered as the purest type, and that the nearest approaches 

 to him in appearance and certain qualities are the most 

 valuable. A recent and well-informed explorer has stated 

 that the horses of Nedjed are not to be bought. If so, 

 and if they be otherwise inaccessible, it may be consolatory 



D 2 



