428 SUPPLY OF HORSES ADAPTED TO THE ENGLISH ARMY. 
recommended. Suppose some fiiirly satisfactory mares have 
thrown fillies (which is generally a disappointment), let 
these be well fed, and put to the horse at three years old. 
Experience will soon enable you to decide between them 
which is best adapted to become a permanent brood-mare. 
Each one of them will give you a tolerable foal to pay for 
her keep, and will herself have gained in frame and substance ; 
her year of repose will have much more than compensated 
for the healthy demand made upon her constitution by 
bearing and rearing the foal. The less satisfactory mares 
will then be of the right age to be sold for the military service, 
for which more mares than horses are purchased for the 
cavalry, though in the artillery a gelding has more decidedly 
the preference. 
With other stock, that desideratum, an increase in price, 
seems to be at once responded to by improved supplies; and 
we feel at a loss to account for the exceptional supineness or 
want of skill which cannot be tempted even by that bait to 
the display of more energy in horse-breeding. 
If the farmer were more successful, his better fortune 
would be reflected upon the mounted part of our army, for the 
raising of the value of his produce would inevitably lead to an 
advance in the Government allowance ; and although we do 
not suppose for a moment that his produce would ever sell 
for the factitious prices (ten to fifteen hundred guineas each) 
which are realised at one or two of the annual sales of blood 
stock, yet we think that by more attention to conformation, 
action, and age in the parents, and by the discontinuance of 
the practice of leaving the produce, when weaned, to eke out 
an eleemosynary subsistence on the marsh or moorside, 
breeding horses for general purposes might be made a more 
profitable occupation than it appears to be at present. 
Mistakes sometimes arise because the quality of a horse is 
thought to be discovered while he is yet very young, and he 
is either pampered or half-starved, according as he mjiy be 
considered prospectively capable of splitting a Leicestershire 
bullfinch or an enemy^s squadron. And hence the cavalry 
often gets a thin horse, which, when properly nurtured in a 
regiment, developes qualities that, as the “ best-mannered 
horsein a crack dealer’s hands, would swell the tens he 
cost into hundreds. 
The Remount S^ston in the French Ar?ny. 
Tiie state of the market for horses in France differs very 
materially from our own, the StAte being there not only a 
