Vol. XLIV. No. 1844. 
NEW YORK, MAY 30, 1885. 
PRICE BTVB CENTS. 
12.00 PER TEAR. 
[Entered according to Act of Congress, In the year 18SS, by the Rural New-Yorker In the olflee of the Librarian of Congress at Washington.] 
^flrsmau. 
THE SHETLAND PONY LITTLE GIANT. 
HE horse has always been tue 
object of man’s special care, 
and almost love, and there is 
no animal so liable to be modi¬ 
fied in size, shape and disposi¬ 
tion by the peculiarities of the 
people and country in which 
it is reared. Starting from 
the same ancestral pair, horses have been 
varied until we have the ponderous, short- 
legged, massive-bodied, draft horses of Eng¬ 
land and Scotland, the less heavy but more 
active horses of Perche and Normaudy, the 
graceful, rangy Arabian with sinews of steel, 
as fleet as the wind and nearly as enduring, 
aud, last and least, the diminutive horses of 
the Shetland Islands, each the creature of 
circumstances aud the result of agos of selec- 
ion and breeding with a particular ideal and 
end in view, and each just fitted to meet the 
needs of the people of its native land. 
On page 262, of the Rural for April 18th, j 
we showed the massive two-year-old Prince , 
William, weighing over a ton and the model j 
horse for Eogland's rich and level fields; this ! 
week, at Fig. 200, we go to the other extreme, 
and show, if not the smallest, at least one of 
the smallest horses in the world, the Shetland 
pony Little Giant. 
Some 20 years ago a Scottish gentleman 
purchased on the Island of Shetland, one of 
the Hebrides, a herd of what wa9 the smal¬ 
lest, and, withal, the most perfect ponies that 
could be found, and he has striven by proper 
breeding and judicious feeding to keep them 
of the very small size, if not able to reduce 
them to smaller dimensions; he has succeeded 
beyond his expectations and Little Giant is a 
direct descendant of that stud of horses. He 
is only seven bands and oue inch (29 inches) 
high; a tape carried entirely about him in 
place of breast collar and breechiug, measures 
63 inches; from knee to shoulder he is 
inches; from knee to fetlock, 3>s inches; across 
his foot from outsides of rim is 1% inches; 
his girth is 35 inches,and his weight 105 pounds. 
He is coming three years old. and is every 
inch a horse The stable door and the man 
standing by, both of the ordinary bight, give, 
by comparison, an idea of the size of the 
Little Giant, tie is the property of Mr. Wil¬ 
liam Simpson, of Hunt’s Point, near New 
York, the importer and breeder of Jersey 
cattle. This cut is an exact copy of a photo¬ 
graph from life. 
ftirm 0cononuj. 
gtural Western |t. Jarm gtote.s. 
WHAT FORAGE TO FEED. 
The farmer in deciding what forage to use, 
must not lose sight of the fact that the great, 
the over-shadowing object in all stock-feed¬ 
ing on the farm, should be the manufacture 
of the largest quantity of the best manure. 
He must also remember that the value of the 
manure depends almost entirely upon the con¬ 
stituents of the food upon which the animals 
subsist. Aside from the mastication and the 
action of the stomach in reducing the food to a 
finer form and thus rendering it more readily 
available for the plants,the animal adds noth¬ 
ing to its manurial value. Although if the ani 
mal be full-grown and fed just sufficient food 
to maintain its existence, and the entire excreta 
be carefully saved, very little of the plant 
food, except the carbon, will have been lost; 
yet certainly nothing will have been added. 
If straw constitute the food,nothing but straw 
need be expected in the manure; so that iu 
manure making, as in everything else, it is 
folly to expect something from nothing. 
It may be asked, perhaps, how it is pos¬ 
sible for the animal to exist on its food with¬ 
out taking from it some part of those elements 
from which it grew? Animals exist upon 
plants, and iu turn plants grow from rejected 
animal matter. Animal existence without 
growth is a mere exchange of old, worn-out 
matter for new. In digestion, such elements 
as are needed are selected from the food 
LITTLE GIANT. A SHETLAND PONY, (From a Photograph.) Fig. 200. 
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