.500 THE HORSE OF AMERICA. 



through the wilderness. For either business or pleasure we 

 travel on wheels, and we want the bold, bounding trotter to 

 propel us. The pacer is the early and only saddle horse in the 

 world, but he is not a harness horse. Aside from the few that 

 will be used as gambling machines, his value will recede while 

 that of the trotter will always advance. In the hands of a man 

 of intelligent and fixed purpose it is certainly possible to breed a 

 family of trotters in which the appearance of a pacer from birth 

 would be of rare occurrence, and the longer such careful selec- 

 tions and purposes are continued the more rare will be the recur- 

 rence of the lateral habit of action. 



That the development of the speed of the parents was very 

 important, if not necessary to the increased speed of the progeny, 

 was a proposition that was long disputed. Generally, as on other 

 questions, each man argued it from the standpoint of his own 

 stable, but not a few men of clear minds took that side of the 

 question without regard to the potency of the law of heredity. 

 In the early stages of the discussion of this question it was a 

 difficult one to handle effectively. At that time very few sires, 

 and still a less proportion of dams, had ever been regularly 

 developed as trotters, hence the field for generalization was 

 narrow and many of the instances quoted were disputed. For a " 

 time the battle raged quite fiercely around Hambletonian, as he 

 was the most prominent stallion of that period, and if a man was 

 trying to build up another family he would rave till he got black 

 in the face against "Bill Rysdyk's bull." It is but just to say 

 that the man who led in all this froth and fury against Hamble- 

 tonian was engaged in breeding what he called "Clay Arabs," 

 and after dodging his creditors for a number of years his last 

 hoof was sold from him by the sheriff. On the other hand, Ham- 

 bletonian made his master a rich man, and he left a large estate. 

 Hambletonian was only partially developed, but sufficient to shov/ 

 he was a fast colt for his period. (For full particulars see his 

 history in another chapter.) Abdallah was a very great sire of 

 speed and he was not a developed trotter, but his dam, old 

 Amazonia, was quite fully developed. She won many races and 

 was the fastest trotter of her day. Whether her speed came 

 from a fast pacing ancestry, or whether it came from the reputed 

 "son of Messenger," as stated when she was bought near Phila- 

 delphia, never can be determined. The "son of Messenger" 

 story seemed to be straight, but her form was coarse and plain, 



