74 THE HORSE. 



speed, style, beauty, blood, and action, not an easy gait and the 

 maintenance of a slow pace for many successive hours or days, 

 are the desiderata at the present time. 



With the Narragansett pacer I close my account of the dis- 

 tinctive families of the American horse. 



I cannot be brought to believe that what is called the Mor- 

 gan horse is in any true sense of the word a family ; or, in plain 

 English, that the qualities attributed, and probably attributed 

 with truth, to the very useful stamj) of horse, known under that 

 name, are derived from any one peculiar strain of blood, still less 

 from any one particular individual. 



That one stallion, himself not a thoroughbred — or even if he 

 had been a thoroughbred, which is scarcely claimed for the Justin 

 Morgan — should be the progenitor, to the sixth generation, of 

 stallions, all out of inferior mares, or at best, mares of their own 

 precise strain of blood, possessing and transmitting the same 

 qualities of excellence, year after year, is an anomaly unheard 

 of, a pretence which has never been elsewhere put forward, and 

 one may say, founding the dictum on the experience of all time, 

 a physiological impossibility. 



In another place I shall consider the Morgan horse at some 

 length ; for I admit that the animals so called have their merits ; 

 and then I shall endeavour to show what they are, and what they 

 are not ; but I cannot admit them to be a distinct, or even a 7iew 

 family ; nor can I recommend the use of stallions of that blood 

 for mares of the same type, and still less for mares of higher 

 blood, with a view to propagating animals of the like speed, 

 finish or courage. 



From inferior mares such sires will unquestionably produce 

 offspring superior to the mares^ but, as certainly, infeHor to 

 themselves / since of whatever blood it be that gives the merit, 

 the offspring must have one-half less than the sire. I pass, 

 therefore, for the present, to a review of the origin and present 

 condition of the horse stock of several of the AVestern States, 

 which, with the sole exception of Vermont, are becoming daily 

 more and more the great horse-breeding regions of the United 

 States, and in respect of numbers such without exception. 



This review is made up of reports by most intelligent and 

 competent gentlemen in the several States, and their information 



