Here we have forty-one imported English stallions, contemporaneous with Messenger, occupying the same territory and covering the same mares that he covered. With the exceptions of two or three they were all ranked as not only thoroughbred, but they possessed the most fashionable and successful blood that England had then produced. A few of them were taken southward after a time, but the great body of them lived out their days here.
To this great array of imported English running horses we might add hundreds of their sons, and yet not find one that claimed to be thoroughbred that ever became a trotting progenitor or founded a family of trotters. Mr. Foster and Mr. Simpson, by far the two ablest writers on the wrong side of the question that this country has produced, with this list of forty English stallions before them from which to select their proof that Messenger was not the only progenitor of trotters, were at last compelled to take two of Messengers sons, as trotting progenitors, to prove that their sire was not a trotting progenitor. If the intellectual powers of these two gentlemen had enabled them to scratch ever so little beneath the glittering surface of the word “thoroughbred,” they would have saved themselves from this humiliating exhibition of absurdity.
What was true of Messenger’s contemporaries is equally true of all the strictly thoroughbred stallions that have lived on the earth from his day to the present. No one of them has ever founded a trotting family and no one of them has ever got a trotter out of a mare of his own kind. Out of the half-dozen instances on record where a thoroughbred horse has got a trotter there is no one instance in which the dam did not have a strong pacing or trotting inheritance. If we accept the known and recorded experiences of the past seventy years, in the trotting world, we find two great facts on every page of the record. First, Messenger left a family of trotters; second, no other thoroughbred horse did that. It follows, then, that if Messenger transmitted capacities different from those transmitted by thoroughbred horses, he must have had a different inheritance from thoroughbred horses, and if different, then that inheritance could not have been thoroughbred. From the facts we have developed in the history of his English ancestors; from the ten thousand demonstrations of his American descendants, and from the great laws which govern the transmission of special capacities, we are forced to the conclusion that Messenger was not a thoroughbred horse.