434 BRITISH AND IRISH HORSES. 



views, I remarked how much more sport and how much 

 more pleasure one has in watching a long race ridden by 

 such jockeys as Tom Cannon, John Osborne, Webb, and 

 Watts, who know the pace they are going, and can nurse 

 and get a horse home, even if they have a little the worst 



of it I am quite as sure now as I was then — 



surer, perhaps — that if we had later foals, less two-year- 

 old racing, and longer races, we should have better horses, 

 better trainers, and better jockeys." 



Half-bred Horses. — The ill-defined term, " half- 

 bred." signifies a horse which has more or less thorough- 

 bred blood in him, but which is not eligible to have his 

 name entered in the General Stud Book. As a rule, the 

 best half-breds are made into hunters, and the remainder 

 figure as carriage horses, remounts, and general utility 

 animals. The large majority of the best polo ponies 

 have at least three-quarters thorough-bred blood in them. 



We learn from the experimental researches of scientific 

 men like Darwin and Ewart, and from the practical ex- 

 periences of ordinary breeders, that the offspring of a 

 sire and dam of different breeds may (i) resemble one of 

 its parents ; may (2) resemble both parents in varying 

 proportions ; may (3) resemble an ancestor ; may (4) 

 combine parental and ancestral characters in varying 

 proportions ; or may (5) develop new characters, with or 

 without parental or ancestral characters. From this we 

 see that the more apart, as regards type, a mated stallion 

 and mare are, the more uncertain will be the nature of 

 the physical and mental characters of the future offspring. 

 As the ordinary thorough-bred (p. 426 et. seq.) is the possessor 

 of great speed, but of little strength, it has, in order to 

 produce a foal of the hunter class, to be mated as a rule 

 with an animal which is too heavy for hunting, and which 

 is liable to transmit the cart-horse, and not the " cross- 

 country " kind of conformation. In the field, a hunter 

 with a cart strain will usually communicate the secret 



