3i6 TRAINING THP: TROTTING HORSE. 



The question as to what rate of speed the trotter will ultimately 

 attain lias been mucli discussed, and some liave assumed to fix the 

 limit. This is the merest speculation. A concensus of the public 

 opinion of horsemen in 1860 would have fixed the limit of the 

 trotter's speed at Flora Temple's mark. When Ethan Allen, har- 

 nessed with a runner, went a mile in 2:15 men thought it would 

 never be equaled, and the popular feeling certainly was that no horse 

 could do it alone. Only a little over twenty years ago it was timidly 

 that Hiram Woodruff ventured the forecast that Dexter would beat 

 Flora Temple's record, but to-day a gap of eleven seconds is open 

 between Flora Temple's record and that of Maud S., and upward of 

 one hundred and forty horses have surpassed Flora's performances. 

 In vi€w of the fact that the trotting-breed is yet in its infancy, and 

 that the average of extreme trotting speed is steadily advancing 

 toward two minutes, it would be rather absurd to venture to fix a 

 limit and a time when progress will suddenly cease. Of course im- 

 provement in speed becomes more difficult as the rate increases, but 

 it will be noticed that the advance toward the two-minute goal has 

 been just as great in the past decade as it was in the slower decade 

 that preceded it. Both trotters and pacers have actually trotted frac- 

 tions of miles at a two-minute gait, and I see no reason to doubt that 

 the trotter will yet be bred that can sustain that rate for a mile. But 

 no horse, tiioroughbred or trotter, can sustain for a mile the speed he 

 can show for a quarter of a mile, and when we see the two-minute 

 trotter he will be a horse capable of trotting a quarter of a mile in 

 from twenty-six to twenty-eight seconds. 



Whatever may be the views of the reader as to the other infiiiences 

 of the trotting-track, he must admit that it has been the chief agency 

 in bringing the American light-harness horse to that point of excel- 

 lence which he has now reached. The love of the turf is deeply 

 rooted in America as well as in England, and I think this devotion to 

 "the sport of kings" is greatly due to the knowledge that the im- 

 provement of the higher kinds of horses depends mainly upon turf 

 tests. •' It is certain," says an old English writer, " that horse-racing 

 was the means of converting the old lumbering horse of this coujitry 

 into the elegant, graceful and pre-eminently fleet animal of . . . 

 the present century." 



The value of the trotting-bred horse has been constantly on the 

 increase, until now the breeding business is a vast interest to which 

 unlimited capital is devoted. That the trotter should be in America a 



