“We have always regarded this fact as the strongest evidence of the intensity of the pacing instinct—an instinct that has such a pure and strong fountain-head somewhere that it is able to overcome the running instinct, though crossed and recrossed upon the pure running blood, is abundant evidence of its own purity and prepotency. And the fact that so many fast pacers are continually thrown from the trotting ranks, now commonly called ‘trotting-bred pacers,’ is but another illustration of the same fact. Verily, back somewhere in the past the pacer was a thoroughbred at his way of going. His remote ancestor, whether in the myths of fables, or in the woods of northern Germany, or the vine-clad hills of Spain, or around the frozen lakes of Canada, was an Alexander, a Julius Caesar and a Napoleon Bonaparte, all in one, in the greatness and gameness of his gait. How else could the fact that every great family of trotters is continually throwing pacers be explained by any other theory? The fact that the trotting breeders have been careless in breeding to mares of strong pacing instinct or breeding, we admit; but the fact remains the same that the pacing blood in the pedigree of such trotters does not appear to have acted as a brake in their way of going, but, on the contrary, has given to them a smoothness of action and an elasticity of stride which has carried them to the foremost rank at their gait; and we are also led to believe that it often requires but a small portion of pacing fluid to overcome several generations of the diagonal gait in the veins of the trotting-bred horse. “Take from the trotting ranks those out of mares or descendants of mares by old Pilot, Jr., and other pacers, and the truth of this assertion will be most plainly seen. In fact, every noted family of trotters, such as the Wilkses and the Almonts—wherever there is any pacing blood, even away back in the fourth and fifth generation—have to the credit of that family some pacer who is faster at his way of going than the star trotter of that family is at his. No Hambletonian trotter has ever attained the speed that has been shown by Direct, unless it be Nancy Hanks, who has some pacing blood in her own royal veins and is inclined to pace a bit herself; nor has any Almont trotter ever equalled Flying Jib and hosts of others we might mention. Among the Wilkses they are thicker than the leaves of Valambrosa, until one is forced to believe that the Clay blood, if such it was, in the pedigree of George Wilkes was about as good as any the great horse had in his veins.