The hay of the valleys is good, but insufficient for the supply of the farms; the deficit is made up by the use of artificial fodders, in which clover enters for three-quarters; the remainder is composed of fenugreek, lucern, and some roots. Millet, or barley and oat straw are also given as food, and in certain cantons they are stacked in alternate layers with the meadow grass, in order to give them the odor and fragrance of hay—an ingenious method of making an unattractive food acceptable. The stables, although much better than formerly, in the good old times of the race, still leave a great deal to be desired. They are not furnished with stalls, but the horses are tied alongside of one another without any separation. But such is the gentleness of character of this breed that an accident was never heard of. The whole of the management which we have just described has a marked tendency towards constantly enlarging the horse at the expense of his nervous system. This diet, completely out of place in a mild, grain producing country, has reason for existing in Perche, and the Percheron cultivator knows too well what he does in employing it, not to have understood this. The climate and the products of Perche, the air and the water, affect too exclusively the nervous system not to require being constantly combatted. For this I desire to take an example in the whole animal kingdom stocking this country. Everybody to-day well knows the influence of climate upon animals. No one now any longer doubts that it is to the sharp and healthy air of the Percheron country, to its elevated hills, and to its atmosphere constantly renewed by the powerful ventilators of its valleys and forests, that this country owes the eminent qualities of its fine race of horses, which has won for it the right of displaying this significant title: “Perche, the land of good horses.” Everything surrounding us inclines us to adopt this opinion. The domestic animals brought here are transformed in a short time by the contact of the air breathed and the nourishment furnished. The marked types of the Billot and Crêvecœur fowls are no sooner brought here than at the first generation a total change is effected in their looks. From the second generation it is difficult to recognize them in the thin, lean, and nervously formed fowl, with a wild look, and always ready to take wing. The bovine race of Perche is also far inferior to the improved race. It is the opposite of the kind prized nowadays, the race which is mild, lymphatic, and short-legged, always inclined to fat, and having in its bony frame only just enough to serve it for its locomotion, forming a quadrilateral of flesh, mounted on four small legs, a rump bending with its haunches, a broad, smooth back, and a low brisket. Its horns, which are seemingly useless in a country from which man has driven out the wild beasts, fall overlapping one another, like a useless ornament, upon the head.