82 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



the business is attempted in the hap-hazard way, the chance 

 of success is infinitesimal. 



But if these failures to make trotters could be profitably- 

 utilized in any other direction, if the horse which finds the 

 miles too long to win somebody's money for his owner could 

 be sold for a high price for other use. there would still be 

 hope for the breeder. But it happens that these families 

 that are the residuary legatees of the trotting-power have 

 little else to recommend them, lacking style and size for the 

 carriage, weight and power for draught, and falling far short 

 of the physical and mental standard demanded for the saddle. 



It is especially unfortunate that several of the favored pro- 

 genitors of the trotting faculty have been the veriest brutes 

 in race and disposition, soft in bottom, unsound, and leaving 

 behind them a heritage of defects that taints their whole line 

 of descent. 



Among the disputes, false pedigrees, ignorance, and hap- 

 hazard of trotter-breeding, the chances and the results are 

 about the same as a cynical Frenchman said they were, when 

 a man sought to get a good wife in Parisian society. He 

 said it was like grabbing for an eel hidden in a barrel of 

 snakes. 



It thus appears th-at our horse-breeding is a failure, be- 

 cause we have pursued a branch of the business that is in- 

 volved in such doubt and difficulty, that it compares with 

 legitimate pursuits as the investment of money in lotteries 

 compares with regular industry. We have done it at an ex- 

 pense that the most favorable outcome could not reimburse, 

 and we have been trying to produce that wliich has but a 

 limited market, and that depends upon sport or fashion. 



At this moment, while the country is full of trotters that 

 lack the disposition, or the wind, or the limb, or all of these, 

 to trot, it is well known that fine horses for carriage-use 

 were never so scarce as they are now. The observer at our 

 watering-places and in the city parks will notice that there 

 is a return to English fashions in pleasure-driving ; that 

 slower horses of fine action, fit to wear heavy harness, and 

 draw large carriages, are in vogue ; that the coaching-clubs, 

 dog-carts, tandems, and T-carts, require a different style of 

 horse from the light wagon ; and the long unused manly 

 pleasure of the saddle demands the shoulder, the pliant neck, 

 and the elastic pastern, of the blood-horse. 



