270 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



be spread throughout the Commonwealth, and that the 

 enterprise and the desire to improve our agriculture, which 

 have characterized that venerable society for nearly a cen- 

 tury, will be seconded by the farmers of Massachusetts. 



I have never been heard, I believe, to advocate horse- 

 breeding by our farmers as a matter of protit. I have been 

 a breeder myself, but I have always doubted whether we 

 could breed horses with profit, while we could get them so 

 easily from the West ; but of course all my opinions have to 

 be pretty rapidly modified in these days. I have seen this 

 last year an increase in the price of horses that seriously 

 menaces the economy that we have lately enjoyed in buying 

 horses from the West. Heavy horses, especially, are getting 

 very high in price, and we, perhaps, may be able, with the 

 assistance of the Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, to 

 breed horses with profit. These horses that they have im- 

 ported, are the very best draught-horses known ; they have no 

 peers in that respect. They are the farmers' best compan- 

 ion where they have bcpn raised for a thousand years, for it 

 is the oldest breed of horses, I believe, except the Arab, 

 antedating the English thoroughbred nearly eight hundred 

 years ; and they are of a type that perpetuates the very best 

 possible qualities known to the equine race, — size, 

 strength, vigor of constitution, docility, and that power 

 which belong!* to all antiquity of blood, of perpetuating its 

 type when it is crossed upon an inferior stock. 



These horses, as you will see by these bills, are pretty 

 well distributed throughout the State. I wish that the old 

 society had imported ten of them instead of five. 1 think 

 they would have had full use in the Commonwealth. I 

 think they only need to be seen to be appreciated. Their 

 quick action, their extreme docility and domesticity, which 

 they derive from their Arab origin, and the continual re-in- 

 forcemeuts which they have had for the last two or three 

 hundred years from imported Arab and English thorough- 

 bred stock, by which their strength and power have been 

 kept up ; all these qualities make them an exceedingly desir- 

 able breed. 



I was announced in the agricultural papers as on the pro- 



