The pony is the most easily kept of all animals. For two or three pounds a-year he can be maintained; for a little more he can be kept in hard-working condition—a useful member of a small establishment, and no unprofitable part of the equine staff of a farm, going over much more ground, with light loads, and a boy to drive him, than a cart-horse that will cost nearly ten times as much to keep. Yet in the end it is idle to deny that it is not his indisputable economic validity that binds the Sheltie’s lovers to him: rather it is himself—his wisdom and his courage, his companionable ways, his gay and willing service. Having taken from him their first falls and first riding lessons, and fought with him their first battles, they look forward to an old age in which he shall draw their bath-chairs; and in the interval of life he provides as a field animal the dual charm of a creature at once wild and tame—wild in his strong instincts, his hardihood, and his independence,—domestic in his wisdom and sweet temper, his friendly confidence in mankind, and his subtle powers of ingratiation. APPENDIX The Making of the Shetland Pony BY J. COSSAR EWART, M.D., F.R.S. PROFESSOR OF NATURAL HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH The Making of the Shetland Pony. “The horses that are ancient we honour because we know not whence they came, but the new ones we slight because we know their beginning.” The Shetland pony belongs to an ancient breed famed for its intelligence and docility, strength and hardiness, but especially remarkable because of its small size. In a recent article on the Shetland pony it is said that “the highest authorities rather incline to the view that he is an instance of arrested development, and that all the equine race originally sprang from ancestors far more diminutive than the smallest Shetland.” It is doubtless true that the remote ancestors of the Equidæ were small, but it does not necessarily follow that Shetland, Java, and other pigmy breeds owe their diminutive size to arrested development. A human pigmy of West Africa is as well developed as a Hottentot of South Africa, and a toy terrier is as well developed as a mastiff. There is hence no _à priori_ reason for assuming that Shetland ponies are not as well developed—mentally and physically as perfect—as Clydesdales or Arabs. Moreover, all animals during their development repeat, more or less, their ancestral history, climb their own ancestral tree, hence if there is arrested development we should find evidence of reversion to more or less ancient types. Is there any evidence that in mind or body the Shetland is an instance of arrested development, or that he owes his diminutive size to reversion towards remote small ancestors? It will be well at the outset to ascertain whether the small size is due to reversion or to dwarfing, induced, partly by unfavourable surroundings, partly by inbreeding and artificial selection.