The horse was found in Britain from the earliest historical times, and new blood was introduced by the Romans, by the Normans, and under many of the successors of William the Conqueror. The Turkish horse and the barb, it is understood, were imported long before the reign of James I., when Markham's Arabian, said to be the first of pure desert blood, was brought into the country; but from that time many horses were introduced from the East, of strains more or less pure. The Eastern horse was the foundation upon which the Englishman reared the thoroughbred, but we must not lose sight of the skill of the builder nor of the material furnished by native stock. The desert strains furnished beauty, courage, and stamina; the native blood gave size, stride, and many other good qualities; the English breeder combined all these and produced what no other nation has approached, the incomparable thoroughbred.
We accept the thoroughbred as we find him. No man can say exactly how he was produced. The great Eclipse (1764) has upward of a dozen mares in his short pedigree (he was fourth in descent from the Darley Arabian) whose breeding is unknown and which were doubtless native mares, for already the descendants of Eastern horses were known and noted. What is true of the breeding of Eclipse is true of many of his contemporaries who played prominent parts in the studs of their day.
For more than one hundred years no desert-bred stallion has had any marked influence upon the race-horse directly through a thoroughbred mare. In the first decade of the last century a barb stallion bred to a barb mare produced Sultana, who brought forth the granddam of Berthune to Sir Archy. Berthune was much sought after as a sire for riding-horses; besides this barb blood he had strains of Diomed and of Saltram in his veins, all of which were desirable for saddle-horses.
Breeds of animals deteriorate rapidly through lack of nourishment and from in-and-in breeding. It is questionable whether a degenerate race may be restored, within measurable time, by the use of any appreciable amount of its own blood; it is certainly bad policy to found a breed upon poor stock. The better plan would be to form the desired type from new strains. One hundred years ago Lewis and Clark found upon the plains of the Northwest "horses of an excellent race, lofty, elegantly formed, and durable," but one could hardly hope to replace such animals from the cayuse ponies, their descendants, without the introduction of superior blood in such quantities as practically to obliterate the inferior.
FIG. 6.—NORWEGIAN FIORD STALLION
