THE HORSE. 128 



bearings reached enormous proportions. Now I have a sort of 

 theor}' that while the horse was regarded as of prime use to man, 

 was bred and kept for his real service, and was an actual necessity 

 iu the performance of the chief business of the country — his useful 

 qualities were developed and held in high esteem, and he was 

 bred and trained almost solely for these purposes — but when other 

 agencies for the performance of business began to be employed, 

 then men began to keep horses for sport and fancy, to develope 

 qualities outside of those belonging to genuine service, and to put 

 them to the performance of tasks for which they were not 

 previously thought of. For instance : before the days of rail- 

 roads, when horses were employed on famous stage lines, and for 

 the transportation of merchandise long distances — what magnifi- 

 cent horses we had all over this Eastern country, which was, forty 

 and fifty years ago, all that was of much consequence in the then 

 American nation. How enthusiastically that great writer on the 

 American horse, Frank Forrester, describes the horses which 

 fornjed the teams on the through line of " flying coaches " between 

 Philadelphia and Portland, from 1825 to 1836 — gc3ing nine miles 

 an hour, including stoppages — equal to eleven hours on the road 

 — and making the time as punctually as on the best English mail 

 routes, at a time when the English mail service was the wonder of 

 the world — these eleven miles an hour over the American roads 

 of that day being equal to fourteen over the English turnpikes of 

 the corresponding period ! Or take, too, the same horses attached 

 to the great teams which transported the supplies of remote places 

 from the great centres of distribution — which carried their mon- 

 strous loads up hill and down over dangerous roads, at a fast rate 

 for the time and the kind of business performed. While these 

 were the uses of the horse, the horse was bred especially for them 

 — and the present generation of breeders, in our own State at 

 least, will not soon see such horses as were then used in the busi- 

 ness of the country, and which the demands of the country called 

 for. "And these horses," says that great authority just quoted, 

 " were obtained from the northern part of Massachusetts, Ver- 

 mont, and some portions of New Hampshire — and from those quar- 

 ters is the origin of the horse of Maine, almost without admix- 

 ture." To go back now and finish the comparison on which I 

 started in stating my theory of the rise of the American trotter : — 

 When railroads begun to be built, stage coaches were superceded 

 as a mode of travel, and the transportation of heavy merchandise 



