EOW THE TROTTING HORSE IS BRED. 497 



than the smooth-gliding pacer. This is not a question to be de- / 

 termined by fashion, but a fact of universal experience that the 

 trotting action is better suited to harness and the pacing action 

 better suited to the saddle. Fashions may change, but these two 

 facts are unchangeable, for they are founded in the nature and 

 mechanism of the two forms of action. The difficulties in the 

 way of separating the diagonal from the lateral form of the trot 

 are very great, and there is no use or wisdom in attempting to 

 blink this fact. Speed at both forms of the gait comes from the 

 same source, the same blood, the same inheritance; and source, 

 blood and inheritance, in a breeding sense, are the hardest things 

 in nature to overcome. So far as experience teaches there is but 

 one method or treatment that has ever been successful in wiping 

 out the pacer. In the first half of the seventeenth century Eng- 

 land was full of pacers, and about a hundred years later she did 

 not have one. The trouble about this remedy is that the trotters 

 were wiped out also, and to-day England has neither a pacer nor 

 a trotter. When she now wants a trotter she has to send to this 

 country and get some of the blood of the little despised pacer 

 that was shipped from her own shores in the early colonial days. 

 The blood of the Saracenic horse has not lost its potency as a 

 pacing expunger, as shown by modern experiments, and all our 

 breeders have to do is to use it in copious effusions, and we will 

 soon be rid of the pacer, and the trotter along with him. The 

 pacer and the trotter are never found separate from each other, 

 so far as my information goes. In Russia they breed trotters 

 methodically, and they have a full supply of very fast pacers 

 that are used as shaft horses in their droskies. As in the past, 

 so in the future, we never need expect to see the two forms of 

 the gait entirely separated. 



Our people, however, are not ready, and as long as the horse is 

 used for business and pleasure never will be ready to dispense 

 with the trotter; and even though some considerable number 

 might deplore the presence and prominence of the pacer, every one 

 of them would welcome him with great joy if they knew he was 

 a necessary adjunct of the trotter. When we consider the 

 problem of reducing the ratio of pacers and increasing the ratio 

 of trotters in what we produce, there is so much that is old and 

 still imperfectly known in what we incorrectly call our "earlier" 

 period of trotting that we find nothing encouraging in the 

 study. The origin of the principal trotters of the early part of 



