Hence, it repels and proscribes the dark-colored coats without examination and reflection, because they are considered the colors of the English horse; it accepts the grays with confidence, because with them it perceives the absence of the dreaded blood, and in them it has found that which satisfies all its wants. Would we have arrived at this point if we had been prudent, and had the cross-breeding been better understood?
Finally, what is there at the end of this negative pole and this positive pole? There is the Percheron on whom has devolved, and will devolve for a long time yet, the rude and killing mission of executing the feats of strength exacted of him by modern civilization. The profits in supplying the demand, accrue, and will accrue for a long time to the producer.
Thus so long as machinery does not replace the horse in the traction of heavy carriages, so long as the necessity for hard labor remains, requiring strength, intelligence, endurance, and willingness, so long to the Percheron alone will be reserved the dangerous honor of being the great draft power, and the price of this matchless agent will increase in proportion to the growing impossibility of finding his substitute.
It is now the time, while crossing the active and trotting breeds with the Arab or with the well-chosen English horse, to carefully preserve the heavy draft-horse, and, by means of persevering and judicious crossing, retain for him his marked superiority.
These crossings, which I will sum up in concluding, may find a powerful aid in the creation of a Stud-book of the Percheron breed.
CHAPTER IX.
IMPROVEMENT BY MEANS OF THE STUD-BOOK.
The Percheron breed is old enough, is propagated with sufficient uniformity, and presents sufficiently marked typical qualities to authorize us in claiming, in favor of its members, the characteristics and the title of a separate and distinct breed. Consequently, a Stud-book, recording its pedigrees, would not be out of place. This book would have the effect of concentrating the efforts of all the breeders, giving them a definite direction, and at the same time it would designate stallions foreign to the race, and which, up to the present time, have been presented with impunity as Percherons.
England exhibits a curious example of the influence of the Stud-book in the improvement of a breed. The equine and bovine races of that country, before the establishment of the Stud and Herd-books, were but rudimental.
The small number of colts of the Royal mares by Eastern stallions would have been lost had they not been classed together in families in a special book.