Horse-Breeding Methods 69 



worthless and preserve what they consider 

 as best, and a comparison between this selec- 

 tion by the breeders and what happened to 

 the ancestors of these animals from two to 

 four generations previously shows what kinds 

 of experiments are successful and what kinds 

 are failures. The lapse of time between the 

 beginning of the experiments and the selec- 

 tion of the results is so great that the men 

 who do the selecting lose sight of what the 

 other men did at the beginning. 



Breeding trotters is probably the most un- 

 certain of businesses. The gambler is cer- 

 tain, sooner or later, to win or lose according 

 to the side of the table he is on. There is a 

 margin for or against him. In breeding 

 trotters, all is chance. In one year a young 

 man bred two cheap mares to two cheap 

 stallions and drew two capital prizes. He 

 was extolled for knowledge of breeding prin- 

 ciples, yet in twenty years of subsequent 

 experiments he did not even obtain an ordi- 

 nary prize. During the same twenty years 

 men all around him were drawing prizes of all 



