In our own country there has always remained a blank in horse history that nobody has attempted to supply. This blank embraced a century of racing of which we of the present generation have been entirely ignorant. Believing that a correct knowledge of the horse of the Colonial period, in his size, gait, qualities and capacities was absolutely essential to an intelligent comprehension of the phenomena presented on our trotting and running courses of the present day, I have not hesitated to bestow on this new feature of the work great labor and research. In this I have felt a special satisfaction in the fact that while the field is old in dates, this is the first time it has ever been traversed and considered.
In the chapters which follow, many historical questions are treated at such length as their relative importance seems to demand, embracing the different families that have contributed to the building up of the breed of trotters; and the question of how the trotting horse is bred is carefully considered in the light of all past experiences and brought down to the close of 1896. These chapters will not surprise the old readers of the _Wallace’s Monthly_, for they will here meet with many thoughts that will not be new to them, but they will find them more fully elaborated, in more orderly form, and brought down to the latest experiences.
It is not the purpose of this book to furnish statistical tables covering the great mass of trotting experiences, nor to consider the mysteries of the trainer’s art that have been so ably discussed by experienced and skillful men. But the real and only purpose is to place upon record the results of years devoted to historical research, at home and abroad; to dispel the illusions and humbugs that have clustered about the horse for many centuries; and to consider with some minuteness, which of necessity cannot be impersonal, the great industrial revolution that has been wrought in horse-breeding, and all growing out of a little unpretentious treatise written twenty-five years ago, which contained nothing more striking than a little bit of science and a little bit of sense intelligently commingled. The battle between the principles of this treatise and selfish prejudices and mental sterility, was long and bitter, but the truth prevailed, and in the production of the Driving Horse the teachings of that little paper have placed our country first among all the nations of the earth.