TIMES OF HENRY VUI, 87 



I readily admit the harshness and arbitrary nature of such 

 regulations, but I cannot imagine how " they should have the 

 effect, which common sense would have anticipated — that the 

 breed of horses was not materially improved, and the numbers 

 sadly diminished." 



The prohibiting, and in a great measure rendering impossi- 

 ble, the production of offspring by undersized and ill-formed 

 parents, is only compelling the whole unreflecting populace to 

 do what every reflecting and intelligent breeder does voluntarily, 

 because he knows it is for his own advantage to do it. 



Xo horseman can, I presume, doubt that, if such a thing 

 were possible as absolutely to prohibit and prevent the use of 

 stallions or mares, for breeding purposes, evidently broken- 

 winded, with faulty forelegs, bad feet, spavined, or otherwise 

 notoriously unsound, malformed, or physically defective, the 

 race of animals would be immediately and materially im- 

 proved. 



K the qualities, whether defects or merits, of the horse, and 

 of animals generally, whether phj^sical or mental, be hereditary 

 and transmissible with the blood, the improvement, which 

 would result from such prohibition, is a necessary consequence. 



If the qualities be not hereditary and transmissible, then the 

 whole theory and system of breeding is a fallacy, and the blood- 

 horse himself not a reality but a myth. 



That such prohibitory enactments as that first named, com- 

 pelling the destruction of undersized horses and mares on the 

 public wastes and commons, would naturally tend, if uncon- 

 nected with any other statute on the subject, to diminish the 

 number, while improving the standard, of all horses bred, is 

 certain. 



But we find here in Henry YIII.'s reign — wonderful reign, 

 trul}'', of a wondei'ful man — another enactment, far more arbi- 

 trary than the preceding — rendering compulsory the maintenance 

 of so gi-eat a number of full-sized mares and stallions, in every 

 deer park, and in every rural parish of the realm, as must have 

 tended to bring about an increase of animals, bred of powerful 

 and well-formed parents, equal, at least — in all probability, one 

 would say, vastly superior — to that of the w^orthless jades, de- 

 stroyed under the first clause of the act. 



