88 BREEDING AND REARING OF 



is a big race of jacks. The jack fifteen hands high 

 out of the twelve and one-half hand jennet is over- 

 grown to a greater extent than is the sixteen hand 

 jack from the fourteen and one-half or fifteen hand 

 jennet. The experience of these men has been this: 

 They own no large jennets, and never did. They 

 sometimes, however, get a large jack in spite of the 

 smallness of their jennets. This jack is overgrown 

 and does not breed up to himself, but reproduces 

 the size of his ancestor. And hence they cry aloud 

 from the housetops and from the public prints, 

 "Don't breed to a big jack." And they are in a 

 measure correct, so far as the big jacks which 

 they raised are concerned. But breed a big jack 

 to a big jennet, and the issue will have as much 

 hardness, style and action, as well as size and the 

 power to transmit all these desirable qualities, as will 

 the small jack to transmit the qualities of himself. In 

 other words, the issue will then be in almost exact 

 proportion. When you meet one of these antiquated 

 fossils, he thinks he has forever silenced you when 

 he asks if you ever saw a sixteen hand jack over ten 

 years old. He might just as well ask you if you ever 

 saw a jaybird on Friday. Their theory is utterly un- 

 tenable. As a race, the big will not produce little, 

 nor will the little produce big, and if established as a 

 race and not as a phenomenon, the big jack will live 

 to just as green an old age as wall the little one. The 

 Percheron is quite as long-lived as is the Shetland 

 pony. Length of life is not measured by the number 

 of inches or of pounds. 



Another important consideration that will apply 

 with double significance to registration in the stud 



