PAPERS OX BIOLOGY AND AGRICULTURE 151 



speed is better than a mile in two minutes. This im- 

 provement in trotting power has been nearly but not 

 quite uniform during the intervening years. It will not 

 do to say that this improvement is due to improved 

 tracks, sulkies and training. The trotting breed started 

 in crosses of the thorobred on American farm mares, and 

 the product of such crosses at the present time are value- 

 less for the production of fast trotters. It has been 

 more than fifty years since there was any advantage in 

 using the thorobred in trotting stock. 



The gain in trotting power in the trotting horse is a 

 development of the particular thing to which Lamarck's 

 theory is directed, and it is a challenge to that theory. 

 The development of the individual trotter by training is 

 in exact accordance with Lamarck's first law, and race 

 track records show that there is a continued development 

 of power under continued training, up to near the end 

 of life. The race records of the nineteenth century show 

 that each generation of trotters in succession, in certain 

 lines, inherited more trotting power than their parents 

 inherited. Did that gain in inherited power come in ac- 

 cordance with Lamarck's second law, or in some other 

 way? That is a question of fact to be determined by 

 examining the records, and for the purpose of showing 

 the process of testing Lamarck 's theory there is provided 

 a pedigree of the first horse to trot a mile in two minutes 

 and ten seconds. 



The first time a horse ever trotted a mile in two min- 

 utes and thirty seconds was in 1845, and that horse is not 

 in this pedigree. By examining the dates when the great- 

 grandparents of Jay-Eye-See were born, it will be seen 

 that they came from ancestors, no one of which was cap- 

 able of trotting a mile in 2:30. The pedigree therefore 

 covers all of the animals involved in a very considerable 



