MARCUS DALY AND BITTER ROOT FARM 



grees of excellence, suddenly passes from the scene 

 of earthly activity, it is in one sense a public mis- 

 fortune to disband the stallions and brood mares. 

 The upward trend, the evolution of form upon which 

 speed depends is suddenly arrested, and it is nec- 

 essary to find a new man with inclination, means, and 

 brains to engage in a similar enterprise. The new 

 man cannot have the experience of the old one and 

 progress is not as rapid as it would have been with 

 the original stud kept intact. The dispersion of well- 

 bred animals, however, stimulates a wider interest 

 in breeding problems, because each purchaser of one 

 or more of them has ambitious plans of his own, 

 and may in time establish a stud of magnitude. 



When Mr. Daly selected Fanny Witherspoon as 

 a brood-mare type, he evidently was not unmindful 

 of the drift of my contentions. She stood 16.1, and 

 was by Almont, out of Lizzie Witherspoon by 

 Cough's Wagner, a son of the four-mile race horse 

 Wagner. In the stable of Commodore N. W. Kitt- 

 son she trotted some very hard races, winning 52 

 heats in 2.30 or better, and obtaining a record of 

 2.i6J, and trotting to a two-mile record of 4.43. 

 In the days when I pointed to Fanny Witherspoon 

 as an example of the speed-sustaining character of 

 running blood in a trotting pedigree, I was the 

 target of all the critics, big and little, who dogmat- 

 ically proclaimed that every additional drop of 

 thoroughbred blood infused into the trotting struc- 

 ture would weaken, if not destroy, that structure. 



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