8 SURVIVAL or THE FITTEST. 



stuck to tlieir Clydesdales through good report and evil report, 

 and would believe in nothing else ; the Yorkshiremen dropped 

 their long-prized Cleveland Bays the moment it did not pay to 

 breed them ; whilst the mixed race of horse breeders in the South 

 West of England used good cart sires wherever they could get 

 them without asking for a name or a pedigree. The South 

 Eastern breeders did nearly the same, but, when they had entirely 

 altered the character of their horses, they still kept the names and 

 colours of their Norfolk trotters, and their Suffolk Punches. 



11. — In every temperate part of the civilized world, the 

 English Thoroughbred horse has more or less completely supplanted 

 every other horse for fast work. The despotic Emperor of 

 Austria, the Czar of all the Russias, the horse-breeding Germans, 

 the democratic Americans, the half- Anglicized Napoleon the III., 

 and even the anti-English Popes have all had to use the English 

 Thoroughbred for a sire, or to drop behind the rest of the world 

 with their horses. 



The British colonists, on the great continents of America and 

 Australia, adopt the Thoroughbred as their own, whilst the Britain 

 of the South has given it a home in which it will certainly not 

 degenerate. 



12. — No competent judge on the subject will doubt that the 

 change on the whole has been good ; yet those who can remember 

 the Cleveland Bays and the old-fashioned Suffolk Punches, 

 cannot but feel that two very useful horses have been rather too 

 hastily dropped, and that we have nothing that entirely supplies 

 the place of either of them. 



THE SHIRE HORSE. 



13. —The free and unbiassed choice of cart sires, which has 

 long prevailed in most counties of England, has produced what 

 is now called the Shire Horse. A horse of no particular stamp or 

 colour, but a well-built, powerful animal, less soft and slow than 

 the old Black Lincoln, though almost as large and quite as 

 powerful. He is more placid, and carries a better "cupboard" 

 than the Clydesdale, and would take a heavier load, or a heavier 

 furrow behind him, without fretting or making any fuss about it. 



