HOW THE TROTTING HORSE IS BRED. 457 



to be descended from the imported horse Messenger. The best 

 performers of that period were as follows: 



Topgallant Betsy Baker Washington 



Paul Pry Sir Peter Sally Miller 



Dutchman Screwdriver Greenwich Maid 



Jersey Fagdown Chancellor Charlotte Temple 



Commander (Bull) Whalebone Confidence 



Gipsy Lady Suffolk Rattler 



Bull Calf Andrew Jackson Lady Salisbury 



Lady Warrenton Fanny Pullen Modesty 



These were all descended from Messenger, and with the excep- 

 tion of Edwin Forrest and one or two others, believed to be de- 

 scended from pacing blood, they were the leading performers of 

 their day. All of the above animals were not equally strong in 

 Messenger blood as threa of them were by sons and out of 

 daughters of Messenger, five were by sons of Messenger, and all 

 the others had more or less of his blood. More than eighty years 

 ago the descendants of Messenger, wherever known, were recog- 

 nized as a family of trotters and this broad fact became a kind of 

 universal belief among horsemen. This belief, being founded on 

 a truth, was all right, but a plausible deduction from it, which 

 was not a truth, inflicted a terrible penalty upon the pockets of 

 otherwise intelligent men for a period of more than fifty years 

 before they discovered their error. The postulate was in this 

 form: "Messenger was a thoroughbred horse and founded a 

 great family of trotters, hence, any other thoroughbred horse, 

 under the same conditions, would have accomplished the same 

 results." This "stock" form of the argument was plausible and it 

 was in everybody's mouth from one end of the land to the other. 

 Every stable boy, every breeder, every editor believed the deduc- 

 tion was sound, and, I may as well own it, I believed it myself 

 until I had gathered together all the accessible trotting statistics 

 of this country and reduced them to order and method, so that 

 they might be studied and their true teachings be drawn from 

 them. As an illustration of the ignorant intolerance and dis 

 honesty with which certain editors and their followers main- 

 tained, less than twenty years ago, that all that was of any value 

 in the trotter was inherited from the runner, take the following: 

 In the autumn of 1878 the famous Maud S., then four years 

 old, came out and trotted a mile in 2:17i, which was then a 

 world's wonder. She was a pacer of the plastic type, but she 



