This fact has no need of proof. We see it every day before our eyes in studying at home the changes that our French breeds themselves undergo when transported from one province to another. It might, however, be thought that these new latitudes, these new regions, would differ but little from those in which they lived. The first change that the primitive horse undergoes, from the difference of the regions into which he has been transplanted, being due to nature itself, we call the result the _Natural Horse_.—Here it is proper to remark how wise nature always is. If it modify the primitive horse for the worse, it modifies him, however, under conditions better adapted to his wants. In rendering him more puny, it renders him more temperate, and enables him to live and to nourish himself upon the food that the locality is able to furnish. Submitted to the trials and the fatigues of war, and to all the miseries in its train, the natural horse, badly built, ungainly and puny as he is, endures fatigue almost as well as the primitive horse. The _Cross-bred Horse_ is, as his name indicates, the issue of a sire and dam of different breeds. This crossing, made with a view to improvement, may give, when judicious, more elegant, better made, and finer-bodied progeny and also quicker in their various gaits, but always requiring, especially if derived from the English, exceptional care, and so much the more particular as they are of a more _distingué_ nature. Abandoned to himself, deprived of blankets, shelter, grooming, and oats, the cross-bred deteriorates early, and in war perishes miserably, while the natural and the primitive horse thrives in browsing upon the scantiest herbage. On this score, our two campaigns of the Crimea and Italy have furnished unquestionable proofs. Such is the result chiefly obtained with the too _distingué_ English horse, even when delivered to the best working mares. In the army, especially, is this point settled; they have there recognized and proved that the worst subjects were always the issue of authors having too much blood and too impressionable. No horses are more apt than these to provoke and render ill humored, and, if I may so speak, ruin the temper of the men placed over them. When a working race is crossed with the English, it is indispensable that the stallion should be well bred and be but a quarter blood,—a quarter at the utmost. And the manner of balancing the blood is neither an indifferent thing nor a thing to be neglected. We should be very careful not to accept as such the product of a full-blooded or even half-blooded stallion and a common mare, but should rather take the product, ameliorated through generations, of strong races that have been gradually perfected, such as, for instance, certain Norfolk horses, certain roadsters and trotters, of which old _Juggard_ was a type, and of which _Performer_, although not so marked, vaguely recalled the memory.