38 THE TROTTING-HORSE OF iMEEICA. 



vast number of persons who now keep good road-horses, 

 if not fast trotters. It was not without some hesitation that 

 I agreed to devote a whole winter to the work I have 

 began. I found, upon reflection, that it would not be very 

 easy for me to convey in print my own ideas upon the sub- 

 ject of training and driving ; and my own experience with 

 some hundreds of trotting-horses has convinced me, that any 

 hope of teaching a man how to put a horse in condition by 

 rule would be entirely fallacious. 



I say, then, at the outset, that this work is to be taken 

 more as a guide and finger-post, showing the way to practical 

 experience, than as a substitute for experience itself. Such 

 general method as I have pursued with good results, I shall 

 communicate ; but I cannot undertake to relate the circxun- 

 stances constantly arising among horses in training, which 

 have called, and always will call, for varied applications and 

 abatements of the rule. Of these, the man in charge of the 

 horse must be the judge as they present themselves ; and, if 

 he is not able to determine how far the general method may 

 be intensified or relaxed in the case in hand, it is safe to say, 

 that it will be more a lucky accident than any thing else if 

 the trotter is fit when he comes to the post. I say, without 

 any qualification, that a man can no more train horses by 

 means of rules ascertained beforehand by other people than 

 one can cure the complaints the human frame is subject to 

 by books written by the most learned of the faculty. It 

 would be a great deal easier for a clever man to write a good 

 book upon a given complaint than to cure a case of it ; and, 

 if the writer was taken with the disorder himself, I have no 

 doubt he would pitch his book on one side, and send foi a 

 practising physician. The fact that the man who is his own 

 attorney has a fool for a client has passed into a proverb • 

 and this is another instance of worthlessness of book-learn- 

 ing, taken by itself. 



Yet books are very necessary for the making of doctors 

 aF>d instruction of lawyers ; and so, when I say that the work 



