16 THE HORSE OF AMERICA. 



ing with the New Englanders. Among the many impossible 

 stories about the breeding of Old Tippoo, the greatest sire of 

 Canada, the truth seems to come to the surface at last, and there 

 can be no reasonable doubt that he was got by "Scape Goat." 

 However much or little dependence can be placed upon many of 

 the claims of fast pacing stallions coming from Canada, it must 

 be conceded that some of these claims seem to be well founded, 

 and that the pacing element has been greatly strengthened by 

 blood from the other side of the border. 



The most striking fact in the history of the pacing habit of 

 action is its great antiquity. The average Englishman of to-day 

 and the average American of twenty years ago have been united 

 in insisting with the greatest vehemence that the pace is not a 

 natural but an acquired gait, resulting from some injury or mal- 

 formation. One of the great leaders on that side of the discus- 

 sion called it "structural incongruity" arising from the breeding 

 of the "thoroughbred" horse on the "slab-sided" mares of the 

 West and South, and thought the idea was unanswerable, but 

 never cited any instances to prove it. Now, the truth is, the 

 earliest unquestioned evidence we have that horses paced is that 

 furnished by the chisel of Phidias when he sculptured the horses 

 on the frieze of the Parthenon at Athens, and that is tAvo 

 thousand three hundred and thirty-three years old. From the 

 period when the sons of Japheth turned their attention to horse- 

 breeding on the fruitful plains and valleys in the regions of the 

 mountains of Ararat down to this culmination of Greek art, I 

 have not been able to find any contemporaneous evidence of 

 the existence of the lateral habit of action; but as we know it 

 existed more than two thousand years ago, we are justified 

 in concluding that among the original bands of horses, in their 

 original habitat, pacers as well as trotters abounded. From the 

 erection of the Parthenon in Athens, the occupation of Britain 

 by the Romans, and through all the centuries down to the plan- 

 tation of the colonies in this country, we have mountains of indis- 

 putable evidence of the antiquity of the pacer. In its place this 

 topic will be quite fully discussed. 



The relation which the pacer bears to the American Trotting 

 Horse has for twenty-five years been a topic of much senseless 

 discussion. In the historical sketch which served as an introduc- 

 tion to the first volume of the "American Trotting Register," the 

 attention of the breeding public was first called to this question, 



