who shall willingly suffer any of the said mares to be covered or kept with any Stoned Horse under the stature of fourteen handfuls."[1] And advice like the following is found in some seventeenth and eighteenth century writings: The cattle "in Somerset-shire and Glocester-shire, are generally of a blood red colour, in all shapes like unto those in Lincoln-shire, and fittest for their uses. Now to mix a race of these and the black ones together is not good, for their shapes, and colours are so contrary, that their issues are very uncomely: therefore I would wish all men to make their breeds, either simply from one and the same kind, or else to mix York-shire with Stafford-shire, with Lanca-shire or Darby-shire, with one of the black races, and so likewise Lincoln-shire with Somerset-shire or Somersetshire with Glocester-shire."[2] Yet it does not appear that there ever was any clear idea of improving the cattle of the country till the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries; and the first sign of it lay in the Dutch importations, or rather not so much in the importations themselves, for the original importers may have intended to keep the imported stock pure, as in the phenomenally rapid swamping of the native cattle by continued crossing with imported stock. "The means of
- ↑ Ridgeway's "Origin and Influence of the Thoroughbred Horse," 1905, p. 360.
- ↑ Markham's "Cheap and Good Husbandry," 1683, p. 70.
