594 Report ujjon the Exhibition of Horses at Kilhum. 
great acquisition. "Sultana" delighted tlie spectators day after 
day by trotting at a speed which must sorely have tried the 
lungs of the nimble groom who led her, and with a lightness 
and activity which recalled the performances in former days of 
Mr. Brierley's famous prize-winner " Sensation," from Wolver- 
hampton — a magnificent grey cart-mare, which, measuring 
nearly 17 hands under the standard, trotted with the neatness 
and agility of a pony. 
Percheron, Boulonnais, and Belgian Stallions. — Percherons, 
once well known upon every " route imperiale," or " route 
nationale," in France — the name having changed time and again 
with the form of government — have the reputation of being 
the best and lightest trotters among cart-horses ; and it is 
probable that many of the heavy grey horses in our omnibuses 
are got by imported Percheron stallions out of English mares. 
The posters of France in former times were almost exclusively 
of this breed ; and the omnibus horses in Paris, which at present 
drag the ponderous vehicles circulating in every part of the 
French metropolis at a speed altogether too slow to suit our 
insular impatience, come from the same race. The heavy 
cavalry horses of Kellermann and of Milhaud, which trotted 
round the squares of the indomitable British infantry at Waterloo, 
had plenty of Percheron blood in their veins, and showed 
themselves, moreover, far too massive for the light regiments 
under Lord Uxbridge at Quatre Bras. The Percheron, and his 
congener, the Boulonnais, have long been favourites in this 
countrj', although our national partiality for a race which cannot 
bear comparison with our own best cart-horse tribes is hard to 
explain, unless it be that, in the minds of all English travellers 
who have passed middle age, their earliest recollections of 
France are inseparably associated with the screaming and unruly 
grey or white stallions which lugged the malle-poste up the 
steeps of the Jura Mountains, or along the poplar-skirted paves of 
Limousin and Picardy. It is denied by the best equine authorities 
of France that the Percheron is a distinct breed, and M. Devaux- 
Loresin asserts that the decree of the First Napoleon, in, 1806, 
establishing a stallion stud at Blois for the creation of artillery 
and cavalry horses, called the Percheron into existence, with his 
neat head, nimble knee-action, and singular propensity of being 
what in Yorkshire is called " handy with his teeth," or given to 
biting. The specimens shown at Kilburn were few in number, 
but among them the first and second prize-winners, belonging 
to M. Modesse-Berquet and to the Duke of Westminster, were 
not without considerable merit ; although for agricultural pur- 
poses they are hardly equal to their Belgian rivals, which, 
