CITAPTEE XXY. 



PILOT AND HIS DESCENDANTS. 



In attempting to give the origin of Pilot, the Canadian Pacer, we 

 are carried back to the earliest period of American history. The 

 horse was not one of the aborigines of this continent. Soon after the 

 discovery by Columbus, horses were introduced in the Spanish-Amer- 

 ican countries, and in the ever varying vicissitudes of the Spanish 

 conquest large numbers of both sexes must have escaped to the wild 

 and fertile regions of the tropical plains of South America and Mex- 

 ico, from which the wild horses so abundant in those regions have 

 descended. In the year 1604, M. L'Escarbot, a French lawyer, 

 brought a large importation of horses and other domestic animals to 

 Acadia, and subsequently, in 1G08, the French, extending their colo- 

 nization to the region of Canada, brought horses to the country bor- 

 dering the St. Lawrence. 



These horses at that date took the name, of French horses, and the 

 designation follows them to the present day. That they were anciently 

 from the same stock whence descended the Percheron or Norman 

 stock is understood by all who have made any efforts to trace their 

 origin, and this carries us back to the early introduction of the blood 

 horse into France. That he was in part of the blood of the Andalu- 

 sian horse which came with the Saracen conquest of Spain, along with 

 the Moor from Barbary and the North of Africa is also a matter of 

 history, but after the Conquest, the Barb, thus introduced, found in 

 France and Spain, in the horses that preceded the Saracen conquest, 

 abundant elements of kindred blood, the same pure strains of Bar- 

 bary and Arabia, that the Carthagenians in their wars of conquest 

 under the great Hannibal had introduced from the same deserts of 

 Numidia and Barbary. 



Hannibal, at the head of a vast army, embracing nearly ten thousand 

 cavalry, all of them of the blood of the desert, and mostly, doubtless, 

 stallions, traversed that part of Europe from Spain to Italy. The 



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