HOW THE TROTTING HORSE IS BRED. 495 



irrefutable, for there is so much in the laws of generation that 

 we do not and cannot know. Take two brothers, for example, 

 and one is a great success and the other a great failure, and 

 often the failure is the better formed and the better looking 

 horse of the two. All that science teaches us here is that one 

 took after some ancestor, near or remote, that was good, and the 

 other after some ancestor that was not good. Electioneer, Al- 

 mont and Pilot Jr. all had short pedigrees composed exclusively 

 of trotting and pacing blood, except possibly a few drops of run- 

 ning blood that may have trickled down from the runner through 

 trotting or pacing channels. Their instincts to stick to the trot 

 had been encouraged and more or less completely developed. 

 Electioneer and Almont both had pacing blood some distance 

 away, and Pilot Jr., so far as we know, had nothing but pacing 

 blood, and yet he never paced a step in his life. This embraces 

 all we know of the three horses that proved themselves the most 

 prepotent in overcoming all antagonisms of race or blood. Others 

 equally great, no doubt, have come up since their day, but as 

 breeding is now better understood and as the laws of nature are 

 now more carefully followed, tests of this kind are not often 

 made. 



After all the "wiring in and wiring out" of the tortuous advo- 

 cates of "more running blood in the trotter" had found that 

 their efforts had borne no fruit and that all intelligent breeders 

 had left their theories away behind, a remarkably brilliant genius 

 struck out a new line of thought and argument, which unfor- 

 tunately died "a bornin' " just as the attention of all intelligent 

 breeders was turning away from "more running blood in the 

 trotter" as a senseless "fad," and looking to the pacer as a possi- 

 ble source of increased trotting speed. In formulating and ex- 

 ploiting his idea, our genius seems to have reasoned after this 

 manner: "The crisis is here, the breeders are all turning away 

 from the thoroughbred as a source of trotting speed and consid- 

 ering the pacer, and now if I can convince them that the pacer is 

 at least half-thoroughbred I will beat the standard and win the 

 day." Here we have the motive and the subject, and now we are 

 ready for the manipulation. In due time the article appeared, 

 and I must do the writer the justice of saying I never have been 

 fully satisfied that he believed a single word of it himself. He 

 starts out to show that the pace is not the result of hereditary 

 transmission but the result of "structural incongruity." He 



