Page:Hints to Horse-keepers.djvu/46

38 with some one or more faults in symmetry, which are positive defects, although only in a secondary degree, and which are, at the same time, counterbalanced by so great a number of positive advantages, excellences and beauties, that he is wise to waive the one defect, striving to remedy it, in view of the other good to be hoped for from the strain. The transmission of external shapes is as yet a mystery, and probably ever will continue so. No one can say whether the stallion or the mare has the greater share in giving structural form or constitutional disposition to the young animal.

Indeed, there seems reason to believe that there is not any invariable rule on the subject; but that some dams and some sires possess an extraordinary power of impressing their own forms and stamping their own images, in the greater degree, on the young. The general rule, however, and that which it is wise to observe is, that like begets like. Therefore the practice should be always, where one decides to breed from a mare slightly defective in one point of symmetry, to select a stallion as excellent as possible in that point; and if one be resolved for any cause to breed from a stallion of whose blood, or beauty, or performances he is particularly enamored, and that horse be weak in any point or points, to put to him whatever mare one may have in his stud most excellent where he is weakest; but in no case, even if it prohibit one from breeding from that horse at all, to put him to a mare which is faulty in the same part. The second ordinary object of breeding-up is, where mares of some highly valued strain, possessing some degree of pure blood engrafted on an inferior stock, have degenerated in size, in height, strength and size of bone, to breed them to such horses as shall, without deteriorating their blood, improve them in size and bone. This is a far more