acquired under a system of continued selection. Looking only for natural qualities, they should select animals as nearly in a state of nature as they could find them; having good symmetry, a full amount of muscle and whatever natural speed the best animals of the best race are found to possess."

He would have these horses tested for speed when brought home, the standard being a natural degree of speed and not that of the Turf.

"The offspring of these small horses should be tried in each succeeding generation; and we should be satisfied for a few years to see the natural speed of the race gradually augment, retaining only for breeding such as went through their trials satisfactorily."

On a later page he suggests the propriety of crossing these Eastern sires with our Forest and Moorland ponies. He cannot doubt that the immediate offspring of the first cross will prove suitable for the saddle:

"The best saddle horses we possess being now occasionally produced by crossing the race horse with a pony mare. This experiment often succeeding with one of the parents so ill fitted for taking part in it as the modern racer, there is every reason to conclude that, with parents properly constituted on both sides, the breeding of the best class of saddle horses might be accompanied with little uncertainty."

Thus far we find that the suggestions for breeding small horses set out on pp. 36-43 were anticipated over sixty years ago. We must, before taking leave of the author, glance at his plan for "renovating" our half wild breeds of ponies. If it were practicable to carry out the experiment he outlines, the results would be of undoubted interest.

"To experiment properly in this matter it is necessary that a public establishment should appropriate some extensive district of unreclaimed and bad pasturage to the maintenance of a large body of ponies. These should be interfered with only to the extent of severe selection, founded on annual trials; taking the animals for this purpose from their pasturage for a few days during the summer, and tying them to pickets. Here they should be closely inspected, and after the best formed had been selected from the rest, they should be taken ten or twenty at a time by rough riders of light weight, and submitted to a trial of some hours' duration. The animals which went through this satisfactorily should be divided into two portions: one should be returned to their old pasturage to remain at their then stature; while the other portion should be made to occupy a somewhat better pasturage in order that their offspring might acquire greater stature, the rest to be drafted and sold. When old enough the enlarged stock should be tried, and such as went through it well should be kept, and turned out into a little better pasturage than that in which they had been reared, while those rejected should be drafted and sold. It is only in this very gradual manner that the stature of a race can be increased to the point required. Ponies of a pure race being so vigorous as to be wholly unfitted for rich pasturage, they become upon it balls of fat. None of our native ponies under the plan now proposed would be enlarged or withdrawn from their miserable pasturage unless their form and action were good; the only change then effected would be a pasturage a little better. Any further enlargement would be made to depend upon the manner in which they had been found to bear the preceding one."

His plan has at all events the great merit that it proposes to seek the limit of enlargement in the half-wild ponies without risking loss of hardiness and other valuable qualities by pampering.

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