LOWER ANIMALS. 2 19 



descended in three lines from Eclipse, foaled in 1764, and are 5, 

 6, and 7 generations respectively from their ancestor. The short- 

 est period from one generation to the next, in any of these lines, is 

 seven years, and the longest is nineteen years. The average time 

 per generation from Eclipse to Touchstone is 13.40 years; to 

 Voltigeur is 13.83 years; and to Stockwell is 12.14 years. From 

 these three stallions down to their three most prominent descend- 

 ants, the average is 13 years. Sanders gives 6 the ages of sires for 

 56, and the ages of dams for 53, famous stallions and trotters. 

 From this table I find that the average age of sires at birth of their 

 offspring was 13.18 years, and the average age of the dams was 

 9.85 years. If, however, we omit the dams of stallions and take 

 only the dams of trotters, we find the average age rises to 10.55 

 years. In only six cases out of 53 was the dam less than 7 years 

 of age. From these we may conclude that a stallion is at his best 

 between the ages of 10 and 15 and that a mare is best between 

 8 and 12. We also notice that the dams of performers are 

 somewhat older than the dams of horses known only as sires. 



PARTICULAR HORSES. 



To discover what there might be in this I looked up the ancestry 

 of several performers, of which Goldsmith Maid may be taken as a 

 sample. In the ancestry of this great trotter I find mention of four 

 "old mares" and one "mare" about which there is no statement 

 of age. One of these "old mares" was 13 and another, the dam of 

 Goldsmith Maid, could hardly have been less than fifteen. The 

 paternal ancestry of Goldsmith Maid is 5-3-26, from which we see 

 that there were two reproductions from young sires mated with old 

 mares, the dams in each case being old. In this case we evidently 



(6) Horse Breeding, p. 161. 



