436 BRITISH AND IRISH HORSES. 



of his birth to his rider, by his rough style of going, on 

 account of his fore-hand being unduly heavy. Even 

 with a thorough-bred sire or dam of the hunter class, the 

 offspring will have a strong tendency to resemble, in one 

 or more fatal respects, the ordinary seven-furlong race- 

 horse, because its parent was a wide variation from the 

 typical thorough-bred. If flat racing was abolished in 

 favour of steeple-chasing, without diminishing the weights 

 and distances, it would be possible in time to breed hunters 

 and remounts of a far better and more uniform type than 

 we can now do. The great point about obtaining uni- 

 formity of type in breeding, is to have sire and dam of 

 similar conformation. At present, the breeding of half-breds 

 is a lottery, in which the percentage of prizes is small. 



The Shire Horse. — The immense weight of the 

 Shire horse makes him the bean ideal animal for very heavy 

 draught on smooth roads ; but it more or less unfits him 

 for agricultiu"al work, as has been explained on pages 76 

 and yy. Also, his lack of speed, even at a walk, is a very 

 serious drawback in this respect. In the case of farmers 

 in the Midlands, these objections are more than counter- 

 balanced by the high prices obtained for young and pro- 

 mising Shire horses, especially as clay land is the best 

 on which to breed them (p. 401 et seq.). The Shire horse 

 has obtained his name from his native home, the Shires ; 

 and " has been distributed for centuries through the 

 district between the Humber and the Cam, occupying 

 the rich fen lands of Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire, 

 and extending Westward through the counties of Hunting- 

 don, Nortliampton, Leicester, Nottingham, Derby, Nor- 

 folk and Stafford, on to the Severn. It has also been 

 extensively bred in the low-lying pasture lands of England, 

 in the counties both North and South of these named, 

 everywhere retaining its typical character subject to slight 

 variations produced by differences of climate, soil and 

 food " {Sir Walter Gilbey). 



