tainty with which the stallions transmit to their progeny, begotten on mares of a different race, their own characteristics, and the high degree in which the offspring of the mares, bred to horses of superior class, retain the better qualities of their dams. For it appears to be a certain rule in breeding, that the purer the blood, and the higher the vital energy and vigor of either parent, in the greater degree does that parent transmit its properties to the young—although, as before insisted upon, the certain transmissions of the larger portion of those energies is always on the stallion's side, and it is only in the longer retention of an inferior proportion of her qualities by the progeny that the better blood of the dam can be traced when bred to an inferior sire. When bred to a purer blooded stallion than herself, the more pure blood the mare herself has the more strongly will her own marks descend to her progeny, and the less will they be altered or modified by those of the sire.
Now, the Percheron Normans are clearly a pure race per se; we do not mean by the words, a thorough-bred race, but a race capable of producing and reproducing themselves ad infinitum, unaltered, and without deterioration of qualities, by breeding like sires to like dams, without infusion of any other blood, just as is done by Durham, Ayrshire, or Alderney cattle, by setters, pointers, greyhounds, and, in a word, by any and all animals of distinct and perfect varieties of the same species. The only remarkable thing in this case is, that such should be the facts, under the circumstances, of the Percheron Normans, being originally—as they are beyond a doubt—the produce of a cross, although a most remote cross in point of time. The original Norman horse now nearly extinct, which was the war-horse of the iron-clad chivalry of the earliest ages—of William the Conqueror, and Richard
