ANTIQUITY AND HISTORY OF THE PACING HORSE. 1?1 



a horse to travel at the lateral gait without toppling over. From 

 Mr. Youatt and a few other modern English authors, most of our 

 American writers on the horse have derived what little mental 

 pabulum they thought they needed, and thus an error at the 

 fountain has been carried into all the ramifications of our horse 

 literature. Only two or three years ago a very intelligent gentle- 

 man, who had attained great eminence as a veterinary surgeon, 

 especially for his knowledge and treatment of the horse's foot, 

 seriously and in good faith stoutly maintained that the pacing 

 habit of action was merely the result of an abnormal condition of 

 the foot, and that all pacers would trot just as soon as their feet 

 were put in the right shape. We must not laugh at this wild 

 notion, for it is really no worse than Mr. Youatt's doubting, 

 whether it was possible for a horse to balance himself at the 

 lateral motion. Neither gentleman seemed to know anything 

 about the fact that it was a matter of inheritance, and that the 

 lateral habit of action had come down by transmission through 

 all the generations for a period of more than two thousand years. 

 It is hardly necessary to say that the gentleman who was so con- 

 fident that the pace was merely the result of the abnormal condi- 

 tion of the feet brought his notions about the pacer from across 

 the water. He was an Anglo-American, and could make a pacer 

 into a trotter in a jiffy, by using the paring-knife. He was an 

 intelligent man and a skillful veterinarian, but there were no 

 pacers in England and there should be none here. Toward the 

 close of the chapter on The Colonial Horses of Virginia, will be 

 found the observations of an English tourist in 1795-96 who is 

 very certain that there is some mistake about the pacer, and will 

 not be convinced there are any, unless they are artificially created. 

 Having now completed what I had to say about the old English 

 pacer, it is next in order to consider his descendants in this 

 country and the relations they bear to the American trotter. 



