CHAPTER XVI. 



HORSE BREEDING — PRINCIPLES OP BREEDING. 

 Breeding a scientific study — Nature's great law — Breed for a purpose — 

 Selection of the breed — Choice of the sire — Breed best mares only 

 — intelligence, beauty, and disposition essentials. 



THE breeding of horses is a scientific study as practical in 

 its demands as is the science of chemistry or materia 

 medica, or surgery ; aye, and more ; so we must learn all the 

 tninuticB of the business. 



The science of horse breeding has developed special horses 

 for special work, and no one breed or class will fill the market 

 demand for draft horses, coachers, gentlemen's drivers, saddlers, 

 and racers or sporting horses. 



History gives all classes and breeds of horses one common 

 origin (see " The Horse," Chapter I), and the horse, as well as 

 all our domestic animals, has been, to a great degree, molded 

 and fashioned by the hand of man. 



It is written that God made man a little lower than the 

 angels, and, by general assent, the horse is voted next highest 

 in the scale of created beings. The passage in the Decalogue 

 which declares that the iniquities of the parents are visited 

 upon the children unto the third and fourth generations, is at- 

 tended with a new and startling significance since it has become 

 generally understood that this declaration is a concise state- 

 ment of the operations of a physical law applicable alike to man 

 and beast. 



The general principles that "like produces like" is true 

 throughout all animal and vegetable life. Everything brings 

 forth after its kind. 



"We sow pure seed and expect the produce to be of the same 

 kind. Eye will not produce wheat, nor oats barley ; " we 

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