APPENDIX. 331 



APPENDIX. 



THE TROTTING-HORSE HISTORICALLY CONSIDERED. 



The trotting-horse may in all propriety be designated tlie national 

 horse of xlmerica, just as tlie tlioroughbred race-horse is the national 

 horse of Great Britain. In England the race-horse has reached his 

 highest development, and if the race-horses of other countries have 

 excelled, it has been in a great degree through the influence of liberal 

 drafts of English blood. In like manner, but in greater degree, the 

 trotting-horse is the national horse of America. He is distinctively 

 and peculiarly an American production. In no other land has the 

 trotter been generally bred; in no other land has he been brought to 

 high development as a breed, nor in any other land has he been 

 accepted and utilized as specially and superiorly adapted to the every- 

 day uses of the people. It is true that Russia has her Orloff trotters; 

 that writers speak of "Norfolk trotters" in England a century ago, 

 and that in France, Austria and Australia native horses race at the 

 trotting-gait, though they never approach the speed of the American 

 trotter. Though vastly superior to any trotter of foreign origin — or 

 perhaps it would be more correct to call him the only trotter of for- 

 eign origin — the OrlofE does not hold the place in the sporting and 

 business affairs of the Russian people held by the American trotting- 

 bred horse in this country. As to the "Norfolk trotters" of Eng- 

 land, the more that is learned of them the less certain can we be that 

 it is at all correct to regard them as a breed of trotters. It can of 

 course be shown that some of them had speed at the trot far superior 

 to that of the ordinary English horse; but this hardly entitles the 

 variety to be called a breed of trotters, but rather, to be classed as 

 suitable raw material from which, by selection and development 

 through a series of generations, a trottiug-breed might have been 

 evolved. 



