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Page:Old Melbourne Memories.djvu/236

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220
OLD MELBOURNE MEMORIES
chap.

a turn for scientific research; good horsemen, all fond of that branch of stock-breeding. The run being of choice quality was comparatively small in extent. The stock were kept in paddocks for part of the year. The grooms were good, and always under strict supervision. The young horses were stabled and well fed during breaking, brushed and curry-combed daily. They were used after the cattle when partly broken—an excellent mode of completing a horse's education. And yet the result was, as I have described, unsatisfactory. The majority of the young horses turned out of this model establishment were with great difficulty broken to saddle, and even then were troublesome and unsafe. How can this condition of affairs be accounted for, except upon the hypothesis that in animals, as in the human subject, certain inherited tendencies are reproduced with such strange similarity to those of immediate or remote ancestors as to be incapable of eradication, and well-nigh of modification, by training?

I may state here that I should not have entered so freely into the subject had the Dunmore stud, as such, been still in existence. Such is not the case. Two of the three proprietors, once high in hope and full of well-grounded anticipations of success in their colonial career, are in their graves. Dunmore, so replete with pleasant memories, has long been sold. The stud is dispersed. My old friend James Irvine, though still in the flesh and prospering, as he deserves, has only an indirect interest in the memory of "Traveller," whose qualities during life he would never have suffered to be thus aspersed. The