A Percheron stallion called _Jean-le-Blanc_, native of Mauves, and sold about the year 1825 to a M. Viard of Villers, in Ouche, near Sap, (department of the Orne,) has been the sole improving agent of the equine race in Ouche, which, up to that time, was reduced to miserable small horses without any stamp or value. Although heavy, powerful, and, indeed, a shaft-horse, his gait and an indescribable something pervading his whole body, recalled so thoroughly the idea of the oriental family that one was disposed to take him for an enlarged Arabian. This fact, often related to us, excited our curiosity. We did not rest until pressing inquiry upon inquiry, one after another, we ascertained that his family had been crossed with a stallion from the Pin stables, standing at the Chateau of Côèsmes, near Bellesme. And, what was this stallion? The Arab _Gallipoli_! What can be inferred from these facts, if it be not that the crossings which have best succeeded in Perche have been those of the Arab, and that the English crosses have only succeeded when tempered by contact with the Arab? But if the absolute want of stallions for improving the breed be felt among the pure Percherons; if it be impossible to procure either good Arabs or heavy English, freshly tempered with Arab blood; if important and powerful considerations compel a recourse to the English cross, the latter should only be accepted intelligently and under good and wise conditions. Therefore we ask leave to refer the reader particularly to what we have already advanced in the preceding chapter upon the choice of an English stallion. In Brittany, in the department of Finisterre, we have often heard it declared by quite a large number of breeders, that for having wished to proceed too fast in that way, they had, from the commencement, experienced numberless disappointments, the second generation from the English cross being always inferior to the first. From stout sires and dams, who, from their general appearance might be classed in the category of heavy-draft, there daily came ungainly stock, thin, lanky, leggy, and without weight in the hind-quarter, unattractive, of a difficult sale when young, and proving a veritable misfortune to the small farmer counting upon the sale of the colt to pay his rent and having neither the place nor means to raise him. This stock was, moreover, the object of another disappointment quite as serious as the first; rarely was a good worker to be found among this burdensome race.