The most striking fact in the history of the pacing habit of action is its great antiquity. The average Englishman of to-day and the average American of twenty years ago have been united in insisting with the greatest vehemence that the pace is not a natural but an acquired gait, resulting from some injury or malformation. One of the great leaders on that side of the discussion called it “structural incongruity” arising from the breeding of the “thoroughbred” horse on the “slab-sided” mares of the West and South, and thought the idea was unanswerable, but never cited any instances to prove it. Now, the truth is, the earliest unquestioned evidence we have that horses paced is that furnished by the chisel of Phidias when he sculptured the horses on the frieze of the Parthenon at Athens, and that is two thousand three hundred and thirty-three years old. From the period when the sons of Japheth turned their attention to horse-breeding on the fruitful plains and valleys in the regions of the mountains of Ararat down to this culmination of Greek art, I have not been able to find any contemporaneous evidence of the existence of the lateral habit of action; but as we know it existed more than two thousand years ago, we are justified in concluding that among the original bands of horses, in their original habitat, pacers as well as trotters abounded. From the erection of the Parthenon in Athens, the occupation of Britain by the Romans, and through all the centuries down to the plantation of the colonies in this country, we have mountains of indisputable evidence of the antiquity of the pacer. In its place this topic will be quite fully discussed.
The relation which the pacer bears to the American Trotting Horse has for twenty-five years been a topic of much senseless discussion. In the historical sketch which served as an introduction to the first volume of the “American Trotting Register,” the attention of the breeding public was first called to this question, in a form that was somewhat tentative, and much less didactic than my judgment suggested, but it served as an introduction to the study of the question which it foreshadowed. From this initial paragraph grew the discussion that has been going on ever since, much of which has been the merest jargon. The essential oneness of the trot and the pace has been clearly demonstrated by thousands of experiences. The trotting inheritance that produces the fast trotter also produces the fast pacer; and the pacing inheritance that produces the fast pacer also produces the fast trotter. The trotting-bred John R. Gentry, with his pacing record of a mile in two minutes and one-half a second, is but a single instance of very many of the same character. The fastest harness racers in the world are the pacers, and it seems to make no difference whether the inheritance of speed comes from the trotter or the pacer. The subject of the pacer in his diversified historical relations to the American trotter will be found in different portions of this work, and all tending to show the significant fact that he is again rapidly attaining the position of honor among the equine race which he maintained for so many centuries in the far-distant past.