102 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



lively team in front of him (I mean in color) in the dark. 

 He could see whether the postilion had gone to sleep and 

 tumbled off of a gray horse better than he could with a horse 

 of any other color, and it was the object of men breeding 

 for posting purposes to get as many gray horses as they 

 could. Consequently grays were the ones that were kept to 

 breed from, and so entirely has that color become part of the 

 Perchcron horses, that you may say that it is a rare excep- 

 tion when you see one of them that is not gray. Where 

 they are not gray they are liable to be black. And let me 

 say to you that black and gray are almost interchangeable 

 colors in a horse. Gray colts, as you all know, are foaled 

 black, and they become gray very easily after they get to be 

 a year old. 



In regard to the use of oxen as compared with horses on 

 our farms, I sympathize entirely in feeling with the gentle- 

 man from Nantucket, and with my good friend from Sutton, 

 about the use of oxen. There is nothing I love so much as 

 to see some other man using oxen. (Laughter.) I rejoice 

 in them ; I love them. There is something beautiful about 

 the work of the ox upon the farm ; but where farmers have 

 got to use machinery to the extent that they must in our time 

 to keep up, and where there is so much going to market and 

 so little drawing of wood and heavy products off of the farm, 

 I think that we are compelled now to use horses and to give 

 up oxen, as a matter of economy. Of course I am leaving 

 out the question that was so ably presented here this morn- 

 ins:, the raising of beef on the farm. I mean, that for the 

 work of the farm we must, I think, rely upon horses ; and 

 the Percherons certainly under those circumstances are the 

 horses best adapted to the farm work, for they are not only 

 large and powerful, but docile and willing to do any work 

 that they arc called upon to do, heavy or light, and they have 

 a remarkable turn of speed. Some of the handsomest horses 

 ever seen in the world are in the coupes of the city of Paris, 

 — selected Percheron horses. There are really three sizes 

 of those horses, and if I criticised at all the horses imported 

 for the Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, I should 

 say that they were rather too heavy. They are so large, 

 indeed, that I think people are a little averse to their use. 



