ANTIQUITY AND HISTORY OF THE PACING HORSE. 169 



Long journeys in the saddle became less frequent, good roads 

 began to appear and vehicles on wheels took the place of the saddler 

 and the pack horse. To get greater weight and strength for this 

 service, recourse was had to crosses with the larger and courser 

 breeds, and through these channels have come the giants and the 

 pigmies of the modern race course. Under the changed condi- 

 tions of travel and transportation it is not remarkable that the 

 people should have been willing to see their long-time favorites 

 disappear, for it is known to every man of experience that the 

 pace is not a desirable gait for harness work. No doubt the pacer 

 is as strong as the trotter of the same size and make-up, but in 

 his smooth, gliding motion there is a suggestion of weakness com- 

 municated to his driver that is never suggested by the bold, 

 bounding trotter. The antagonism between the pacers and the 

 new horses of Saracenic origin was irreconcilable and one or the 

 other had to yield. As the management of the contest was in 

 the hands of the master the result could be easily foreseen, for if 

 one cross failed, another followed and then another, till the Sara- 

 cenic blood was completely dominant in eliminating the lateral 

 and implanting the diagonal action in its stead. 



As no home-bred pacer, of any type or breed, has been seen in 

 England for nearly two hundred years, it is not remarkable that 

 Englishmen of good average intelligence, for the past two or three 

 generations, have lived and died supposing they knew all about 

 horses, and yet did not know there had ever been such a thing in 

 England as a breed of pacing horses. When, some eighteen or 

 twenty years ago, I called the attention of Mr. H. F. Euren, 

 compiler of the Hackney Stud Book, to the early English pacers 

 as a most inviting field in which to look for the origin of the 

 "Xorfolk Trotters/' he was surprised to learn that such horses 

 had existed in England, but he went to work and gathered up 

 many important facts that appear in the first volume of the 

 Hackney compilation. Many of these facts, but in less detail, 

 had already appeared, from time to time, in Wallace's Monthly, 

 but Mr. Euren's was the first modern English publication to 

 place them before English readers. From this prompting, Mr. 

 Euren did well, but we must go back a little to see how this sub- 

 ject was treated by English writers of horse books, who wrote 

 without any promptings from this side. 



Mr. William Youatt was a voluminous writer on domestic 

 animals, and at one time was looked upon as the highest author- 



