154 THE HORSE 



potency, but, despite the evidence to the contrary, 

 a belief prevailed that thorough blood was antag- 

 onistic to the trotting action and therefore to be 

 kept as remote as possible. It thus came about 

 that some rank quitters were bred, horses that, al- 

 though they had speed, could not stand up to a 

 race of broken heats. And it has been said, with 

 much reason, that " God hates a quitter." 



The number of blanks in the lottery (for so it 

 was then frequently called) of breeding caused 

 serious reflection upon the course being followed 

 and more than twenty-five years after the days of 

 Dutchman and Flora Temple some very intelligent 

 horsemen felt that in many of the essential quali- 

 ties of the race-horse the earlier celebrities had 

 never been surpassed and that therefore the im- 

 provement in trotters was much less than was 

 commonly supposed. Looking back now, how- 

 ever, one cannot but feel that in reality a great 

 advance had been made. For, not to mention 

 other sires, the great Rysdyk's Hambletonian had 

 been bred and was now founding a family destined 

 to be without a peer in the racing world and, not- 

 withstanding the innumerable failures and disap- 

 pointments and blunders in breeding, nothing was 

 now more certain than that trotters were begotten 

 by trotters. A new and distinct breed, in fact, 

 was in process of formation. 



