298 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



market, and they have iiitroJuced, especially in the State of 

 Illinois, from which they have spread all over the western part 

 of the country, the blood of the French horse that is gen- 

 erally known as the Percheron. Mr. Dunham of Du Page 

 Co., Illinois, has imported more than a thousand Perch- 

 erons, and his, and other importations, have been spread all 

 over the West. I rarely see a carload of horses come into 

 Boston now without noticing some very marked evidences of 

 Percheron blood. I can point them out in almost every lot 

 I see taken through the streets. These animals are being 

 distributed all over New England, and among them are a 

 gnat many grade mares of this excellent blood. They 

 have round barrels, good limbs, sound feet, thin heads, 

 with small ears, not much hair in the mane and tail, tine 

 skins, and for large horses they have quick action. This 

 is the class of animals that should be bred upon our soil. 

 They are just about what the Morgan horse was thirty-tive or 

 forty years ago, but about two sizes larger. You remember 

 that the Morgan horse was well made all over, and the 

 horse dealers nowadays will speak of him, as a sort of 

 reminiscence, as a "Morgan chunk." They were small; 

 there was not blood and bone enough iu them. They 

 weighed from eight hundred to nine hundred and fifty 

 pounds; but they were capable and cheerful on the road. 



You see about the hall here some of the bills that give 

 you a knowledge of what the old Society for the Promotion 

 of Agriculture, that for nearly a hundred years has been 

 quietly active in the agriculture of Massachusetts, has done 

 during the last year for the farmers in the importation of 

 five Norman Percheron horses from France, that are placed 

 about the State in convenient localities, to which any farmer 

 can take a mare at a reasonable price. There is no farmer 

 in the Commonwealth so situated that he cannot easily reach 

 one of these horses. The horse-breeding literature of Massa- 

 chusetts has, for the last twenty-tive or thirty years, been 

 managed by stallion keepers. Farmers have been induced 

 to believe that by breeding any of their little worn-out 

 mares, that in some cases have been half-starved in pastures 

 in summer, and kept on meadow hay in Avinter, to any 

 fashionable stallion, and paying from fifty to two hundred 



