98 



besides famous old Touchstone, a young stal- 

 lion (formerly run by Lord Palmerston) called 

 Buckthorn, with whom, the head groom told 

 me, the racing men found fault on account of 

 the shortness of his back, which, though a 

 oreat source of strength and a favorite point 

 in ' l useful" horses, does not meet the require- 

 ments of the turf. 



Blood horses have had powerful and elec- 

 tive advocates in the modern writers Nimrod, 

 Harry Hieover, and Cecil, who contend that 

 they are the proper race to communicate the 

 greater speed demanded at the present day, 

 by the improved roads, the chase, the evolu- 

 tions of armies, and the hurry of the world. 

 This, together with the importance attached to 

 fixity of type, has produced a further increase 

 of their number, and very generally caused 

 them to be resorted to as the progenitors of 

 Hacks (I mean gentlemen's saddle horses), 

 Hunters, Chargers (first class horses for mili- 

 tary officers and cavalry), and even carriage 

 horses of the lighter class, by part bred mares. 

 The aim of the breeders is to produce hunters, 

 as being the highest priced animals, averaging 

 at Melton Mowbray £200, and fetching occa- 

 sionally £1100; and if they fail in that, by 

 reason of want of substance, to have a hack. 

 Should the progeny be very strong, but desti- 

 tute of the qualities of good hunters, they 

 would probably answer in one of the other ser- 

 vices mentioned. Between thorough-breds 

 the attempt is always tb breed racers ; but in 

 the event of want of speed the colts become 

 either hacks, or hunters in a light country if 

 they have strength enough. About three out 

 of every seven of the blood horses actually put 

 in training as yearlings, in England, are per- 

 manently withdrawn from the turf, from want 

 of merit and from constitutional inability to 

 endure the severity of the probationary disci- 

 pline at that tender age ; and, at a later period, 

 many of them, the males especially, are dis- 

 tributed among the various useful services to 

 which they are respectively best adapted. In 

 Yorkshire a farmer is, by an old proverb, com- 

 miserated if he has " a lot of ugly daughters 

 and blood fillies," because they both are apt 

 to remain on his hands a long time, sources of 

 expense. The reason of this, in reference to 

 the blood fillies, is that they are rarely resorted 

 to to breed " useful " horses from, and cannot 

 earn their living by ordinary work ; nor will 

 they often command remunerative prices, unless 

 sired by " fashionable " horses as they are 

 termed, standing at £30, £40, and £50, and 

 unless they are in the possession of the rich, 

 who can afford to force them by feeding and 

 housing and encounter the great oares, uncer- 



tainties, and risks of rearing them properly, 

 and can train them and enter them for great 

 races, and run them successfully ; for perform- 

 ance on the turf is almost the only received 

 and acknowledged test of the merit of a blood 

 horse. 



With a continuation of the state of things 

 in which the greater number of the useful and 

 stylish horses having activity are reproduced 

 by thorough-bred stallions, out of mares of 

 higher and higher breeding, losing their stam- 

 ina every successive generation, it is easy to 

 perceive that the steady and progressive ap- 

 proximation to the characteristics of the race- 

 horse (a perfect animal for its special purpose), 

 is depriving those horses of England, intended 

 for useful porposes, of their strength and size. 

 The geometrical progression, obtained by cross- 

 ing an ameliorating race on a common and 

 wholly distinct one, always using pure-bred 

 males of the ameliorating race with the female 

 progeny of each successive cross, is such that 

 an animal of the tenth generation would have 

 of the blood of the common race but a rem- 

 nant of one out of a thousand and twenty- 

 four parts; and in the twentieth generation 

 there would be very much less than one-mil- 

 lionth part of the common blood left. The 

 fractional series is: \ \ \ T l t $ t -fa T £ F 

 yts s\~z TTHT4? & c -* An eminent member of 

 the veterinarian faculty, an Englishman by 

 birth, but now a resident of New York, soon 

 after his return from a late visit to his native 

 country, observed to me that he thought there 

 was a marked want of bone, however dense it 

 might be, in the majority of the horses now 

 seen in Hyde Park. This subject of the 

 diminished power of the classes of useful 

 horses has arrested the attention of Spooner, 

 the author of several distinguished veterinarian 

 works, and he boldly and stoutly recommends, 

 as a remedy, recourse to "half-bred" stallions. 

 I saw no part-bred stallions in England ; some 

 of the Cleveland Bays happily supplying the 

 desideratum which Mr. Spooner would seek in 

 half-bred stallions, with the additional advan- 

 tage of fixity of type. These Yorkshire is 

 fortunate in possessing as a distinct breed, 

 which is the reason, perhaps, why this county 

 furnishes almost all the very strong horses in 

 England with beauty and action. Hence it is 

 that the British Government have to give to a 

 Yorkshire man the contract for mounting the 

 crack cavalry regiments ; and the East India 

 Company employ the same man, Jonathan 

 Shaw, to supply their studs with Cleveland 

 stallions, to strengthen and improve the indig- 



*Zootechxue Generate — M. Villeroy. 



