HOW THE TROTTING HORSE IS BRED. 487 



to take the improper and dishonest use of the word by the throat 

 there would be no breed of trotters, and the whole business of 

 breeding and developing the trotting horse would be to-day just 

 where it was thirty years ago. The old, threadbare stock argu- 

 ment was iu everybody's mouth, to the effect that "Messenger 

 was an English thoroughbred and he founded a family of trotters, 

 hence any other English thoroughbred could do the same thing 

 under the same circumstances." When this ancient formula 

 was submitted to the test it was found to be fatally unsound at 

 both ends, as has. been shown in another chapter. Messenger 

 was found to be far short of being thoroughbred in his inherit- 

 ance; forty other English thoroughbreds had been in competition 

 with him and bred upon the same mares, yet no other English 

 thoroughbred, in the experiences of a hundred and fifty years, 

 ever founded a family of trotters. The two ablest advocates of 

 "more running blood in the trotter" that this country has pro- 

 duced, Mr. Charles J. Foster and Mr. Joseph Cairn Simpson, when 

 challenged to produce an English thoroughbred horse that had 

 founded a family of trotters, conceded the whole contention by 

 naming Bishop's Hambletonian and Mambrino, both sons of 

 Messenger and the principal channels through which Messenger 

 had founded his family of trotters. This knocked all the noise 

 out of the famous formula, and instead of the braying of an ass 

 we have heard nothing since on this subject but an occasional 

 and very feeble squeak of a mouse. 



In the earlier portion of the period when the American Trotter 

 was beginning to assume the shape and character of a breed, the 

 term "thoroughbred," meaning English racing blood, was ad- 

 hered to with astonishing tenacity, as an indispensable element 

 in the breeding of the trotter. A few men of clear and independ- 

 ent minds commenced to study the question in the light of ex- 

 periences, and they were not long in reaching the truth; but, as a 

 rule, the less a man knew of the question, whether a breeder or 

 a writer, the more blatant and vociferous he was in maintaining 

 that all trotters were dependent for their speed on the blood of 

 the "thoroughbred English race horse." When Maud S. made 

 her four-year-old record and astonished the world, the acclama- 

 tions of this class went up in tremendous volume pointing to the 

 Boston blood of her grandam as the element that did it. !S r ow, 

 it never has been shown, and it never carv be shown, that there 

 was a single drop of Boston's blood in her veins. Besides all 



