the fact that to breed a grey horse it is absolutely- 

 necessary that either sire or dam shall be a grey. Lord 

 Middleton, who breeds, at Birdsall, all the horses required 

 for his hunt, has found this rule hold good ; he has ample 

 scope for testing the stability of this fact, for he has no 

 fewer than i6 stallions at Birdsall, and these, in 1904, 

 covered 1,180 mares. 



Why have greys ceased to be common among our 

 race-horses, though formerly so numerous ? The answer, 

 I think, may be found from examination of the lists of 

 fashionable sires during the last fifty or sixty years. As 

 we all know, the three great strains of blood trace 

 back to Eclipse (chestnut), Matchem (bay) and Herod 

 (bay). The prepotency of these great sires included 

 the faculty of perpetuating their colour as well as their 

 other qualities through their descendants ; and, as the 

 tendency of breeders has always been to use these 

 strains, grey has gradually been eliminated. 



Now and again we find that the prepotency of the 

 mare — so far as colour is concerned — was greater than 

 that of the sire. A striking instance of this occurs in 

 the pedigree of Strathconan. His maternal ancestress, 

 the grey Virago (1764), threw the grey filly Speranza 

 (1778) to Eclipse. 



In the pedigree of the grey mare Griselda (1878) by 

 Strathconan, we find the strain on both sides. Her 

 maternal ancestress, Grey Starling (1745), threw the 

 grey filly Tuberose (1772) to Herod. The prepotency 

 of these mares — as regards colour — was such that the 

 grey coat was perpetuated through their descendants, 

 male or female, for a hundred years. 



One curious and mysterious fact deserves mention 

 before we leave this part of our subject — that is the 

 regularity with which some grey mares throw grey foals 



