564 THE HORSE. 



still at the same chateau of Coesme, with the grandsons of those 

 old admirers of the Arabians, that we find again two Arab horses 

 from the stud stables of Pin, Godolphin and Gallipoli. 



These two valuable stock getters, both gray, again gave tone 

 and ardor to the Percheron race, and transformed definitely into 

 gray horses the stock of the entire country, which had, it was said, 

 become less uniform, and of all colors. 



The Brittany horses have been strongly attracted towards Perche 

 by the immense outlet oflfered by the public service, since the in- 

 crease of the roads, to the Percherons. Mixtures between the 

 two races must have been frequent. And when a good Brittany 

 horse was there met with, he must have been made use of, and the 

 old native type has gradually tended to disappear, and its traces 

 become more and more rare. This mixture of Percheron and 

 Brittany blood, too well marked to be questioned, arises from 

 several causes." 



Lieut. Col. Chas. Hamilton Smith, President of the Devon and 

 Cornwall Hist. Society, gives the following points in history, 

 which have a bearing upon the origin of the ' Percheron gray as 

 well as the Norman, and also furnishes some useful hints in rela- 

 tion to the improvement of breeds which are worthy of attention, 

 especially the use of large mares in the formation of large stocks. 



" It has been remarked that the Romans paid only a tardy and 

 imperfect attention to breeding horses, and we have observed also 

 that the stature of these animals, with the exception of the races 

 before named, was below the present ordinary size. The Norman 

 pirates carried in their ships the small hardy breed of Scandina- 

 via, still in perfection in Iceland j all the riding nations from the 

 east and north, Huns, Bulgarians, Goths, and Magyars had small 

 horses ; those of the Ardennes, of many parts of France, of the 

 Camargue, of Switzerland, the Pyrenees and Britain were still 

 smaller ; the Netherland Menaphian alone appear to have reached 

 a full stature. It was, therefore, in the first centuries after the 

 Moslem invasion of Spain, France, and Calabria, when art and 

 science began to revive, and the great empire of the Franks could 

 and did provide wide-spreading precautions against invaders, 

 among which the most pressing were those that were calculated 

 to resist the conquests of Islam. 



With the newly introduced stirrup, they could more properly 

 adopt heavy defensive armor, and in order to give the Christian 

 chivalry a fair chance of success, that which would increase the 

 stature of their war-horses became an object of importance. Ac- 

 cordingly about this period, we begin to observe in the West, 

 places for breeding and institutions of horse-fairs. 



The Moorish and Spanish Vandal (Andalusian) breeds gradually 



