220 SKIN, HAIR, AND COLOUR. 



The hair should be long and thin, finer in quality on the 

 mare than the stallion ; it should grow from the fetlock above 

 the knee, and the same behind the hock. By many this is 

 thought to be a useless appendage, and that this abundance 

 of hair is a cause of grease ; but it is not so by any means. 

 Hair is an indication of bone and size." Mr. Frederick 

 Street, in his History of the Shire Horse, gives *' plenty of 

 long silky hair on the legs " as one of the desirable points in 

 the Shire horse. Mr. James Howard, M. P., in his Note% on Cart- 

 horses (Royal Agricultural Journal, 1884), remarks that '' A 

 grave doubt, however, arises whether the profusion of hair 

 and ' feather ' insisted upon in show-yards and among the 

 leading breeders of Shire horses is really so essential to 

 strength and constitution as is generally asserted and 

 believed. As a farmer of heavy clay land — much of it 

 hilly — which requires very powerful horses in tillage and in 

 carting, I have long entertained doubts as to the policy of 

 the present tendency to such a profusion of hair. Breeders 

 not only contend for hair on the rear of the legs, but 

 many have also come to insist upon a mass of hair in front 

 from the knee downward, doubtless a characteristic of many 

 of the old Shire horses bred in Derbyshire early in the 

 present century. Of course, no one contends that all this 

 hairy covering is desirable in itself; it is advocated as 

 being essential to hardiness of constitution and size of bone 

 This contention merely means that the desired constitution 

 and sufficient bone have not hitherto been obtained without 

 an abundance of hair." This gentleman cites cases in 

 which, for railway work, clean-legged horses are preferred to 

 those with a plentiful supply of hair, on account of the 

 latter being predisposed to grease and other forms of 

 inflammation of the skin of these parts. We may readily 

 see that legs which have a large amount of coarse hair on 

 them would be predisposed to grease and other allied 

 ailments ; for, as both hair and scurf skin are secreted by 

 the true skin, we may infer that if the former is thick and 

 coarse, the latter will be strong and harsh, and conse- 



