MESSENGER AND HIS ANCESTORS. 221 



poraneous with Messenger, .occupying the same territory and 

 covering the same mares that he covered. With the exceptions 

 of two or three they were all ranked as not only thoroughbred, 

 but they possessed the most fashionable and successful blood 

 that England had then produced. A few of them were taken 

 southward after a time, but the great body of them lived out. 

 their days here. 



To this great array of imported English running horses we 

 might add hundreds of their sons, and yet not find one that claimed 

 to be thoroughbred that ever became a trotting progenitor or 

 founded a family of trotters. Mr. Foster and Mr. Simpson, by far 

 the two ablest writers on the wrong side of the question that this 

 country has produced, with this list of forty English stallions 

 before them from which to select their proof that Messenger was 

 not the only progenitor of trotters, were at last compelled to 

 take two of Messengers sons, as trotting progenitors, to prove 

 that their sire was not a trotting progenitor. If the intellectual 

 powers of these two gentlemen had enabled them to scratch ever 

 so little beneath the glittering surface of the word "thorough- 

 bred," they would have saved themselves from this humiliating 

 exhibition of absurdity. 



What was true of Messenger's contemporaries is equally true 

 of all the strictly thoroughbred stallions that have lived on the 

 earth from his day to the present. No one of them has ever 

 founded a trotting family and no one of them has ever got a trotter 

 out of a mare of his own kind. Out of the half-dozen instances 

 on record where a thoroughbred horse has got a trotter there is 

 no one instance in which the dam did not have a strong pacing 

 or trotting inheritance. If we accept the known and recorded 

 experiences of the past seventy years, in the trotting world, we 

 find two great facts on every page of the record. First, Mes- 

 senger left a family of trotters; second, no other thoroughbred 

 horse did that. It follows, then, that if Messenger transmitted 

 capacities different from those transmitted by thoroughbred 

 horses, he must have had a different inheritance from thorough- 

 bred horses, and if different, then that inheritance could not have 

 been thoroughbred. From the facts we have developed in the 

 history of his English ancestors ; from the ten thousand demonstra- 

 tions of his American descendants, and from the great laws 

 which govern the transmission of special capacities, we are forced .. 

 to the conclusion that Messenger was not a thoroughbred horse. 



