374 AGRICULTURE AND THE HORSE. 



in which an admixture of various races is undoubt- 

 edly to be found ; members of a list honorable and 

 illustrious, commencing with Topgallant and Whale- 

 bone and Dutchman and Confidence and Wash- 

 ington and Rattler and Lady Suffolk, with their 

 "unjaiown" strains, and ending in our day with Flora 

 Temple and Goldsmith's Maid and Dexter and Ameri- 

 can Girl and Lucy, and Bonner's Pocahontas (the 

 Bates mare), the queen of mares, with their great 

 records and their absolute defiance of time and space, 

 — these horses, I say, illustrate what I mean by that 

 power of the American trotter which is to be obtained 

 by removal, step by step, from the form and gait of the 

 thorough-bred. 



But not everywhere does this removal accomplish 

 the object which the breeder of horses in America has 

 in view. Old Messenger did not leave behind him the 

 same fruits in Pennsylvania that he did in New York. 

 He met nowhere in that more southern region the 

 blood which it was necessary to mingle with his own 

 in order to produce the genuine American horse. 

 Who can tell that his fame as the ancestor of a long 

 line of trotters is not due as much to the fortunate 

 locality in which his lot was cast as to his own intrin- 

 sic merit? Who can tell that Diomed, and his two 

 famous sons Sir Henry and Duroc, would not have 

 been rivals of Messenger, and his more famous sons 

 Marabrino and Hambletonian, had the two families 

 exchanged residences, and Messenger had gone down 



