BOFS WITHOUT COLTS UNHAPPY 269 



and often unprofitable husbandry. The stocks and bonds 

 of a railway that owns too few, inefficient and poorly 

 cared -for locomotives never sell at par or earn satis- 

 factory dividends. 



It will not require a large fund of knowledge or 

 long experience to fit even a man who has little taste 

 for horses to intelligently select a good brood-mare, 

 and the experience of his neighbors will indicate the 

 stallion to be used which will most, likely beget off- 

 spring suited to the soil and the work to be per- 

 formed. Once the work of breeding is entered upon, 

 even the novice will soon learn enough of the funda- 

 mental principles of breeding to produce animals which 

 are likely to be far superior to those purchased at 

 random under the stress of necessity and paid for by 

 a promise to be fulfilled in the future. 



Farmers' boys without colts are as unhappy as 

 married people without children. Our experience leads 

 to the conclusion that, after keeping an account of 

 the value of the food consumed by colts, there is a 

 profit of from thirty to fifty per cent in raising colts 

 up to three years of age, provided they are worth one 

 hundred dollars at that time, and allowing that the 

 value of the manure produced equals the trouble of 

 caring for them. 1 In other words, in the middle and 

 eastern states, horse -raising at present is likely to 

 produce double the profit that can be realized in most 

 other branches of mixed agriculture; and this, too, 

 by the man who is unskilled, and whose chief energies 



1 See "Fertility of the Land," for quantity and value of manure 

 produced by horses. 



