The Wild Horse of the plains and pampas of North and South America was at one time an object of great interest and curiosity with all our people. No schoolboy of sixty or seventy years ago knew any lesson in his geography so well as the one which pictured and described the millions of wild horses that roamed over the Western plains. In the field of imagination and exaggerated fiction he was a fairly good second to the Arabian—both arrant humbugs, at least so far as their merits have been tested. In the past, the question has sometimes been asked, tentatively, whether the horse may not have been indigenous on this continent? The paleontologists have undertaken to answer this question in the affirmative and have produced the bones of what they call the horse to prove it. This “horse” is scant fifteen inches high and he has three, four or five toes on each foot. These toes resemble “claws” more than anything else. They tell us these little animals flourished over two millions of years before man was placed on the earth, and that they are now found imbedded in the solid rock, say two hundred feet below the general surface. The outline drawing of horses on works supposed to have been erected by a prehistoric and lost race, and also the linguistic question as to whether any of the oldest Indian tribes had any word representing the horse, will be fully considered, with that presented by the paleontologists, in the chapter devoted to the Wild Horse. Too much prominence has been given to the horses of Cortez in his conquest of Mexico, as the progenitors of the American wild horse. He had very few horses in his command, and it is very doubtful whether any of them escaped the slaughter of battle and found a home in the wilderness. The horses in the army of the unfortunate Ferdinand De Soto, that were abandoned on the confines of Texas, after his death, became the progenitors of all the wild horses of North America. The remarkable pre-eminence to which Messenger attained as the founder of a great race of trotters, in his own right and by his own power, and more especially as he was the only English-imported running horse that ever showed any tendency whatever in that direction, the study of Messenger’s lineage becomes a question of very great interest and value to all students of trotting history. His sire, Mambrino, was a great race horse, and was distinguished above all others of his generation, or indeed of any other generation, before or since, as the progenitor of a tribe of coach horses of great excellence and value. In addition to this, the evidence seems to be conclusive that he had a natural and undeveloped trotting step that far surpassed that of all other running horses of his day. His sire, Engineer, was notoriously short on the side of his dam, and his grandsire, Sampson, was a half-breed of great size and bone, and ran some winning races, in the best of company, for that day.