In France the practice of recording the _time_ of a race is looked upon as childish. The reason given is, that horses that have run or trotted separately against time will often show quite contrary results when matched against each other, and that the one that has made the shortest time on the separate trial will frequently be easily beaten on the same track by the one that showed less speed when tried alone. However this may be, it appears that the average speed of running races in France has increased since 1872. At that time it was one minute and two to three seconds for one thousand metres (five furlongs); for two thousand metres (a mile and a quarter), 2m. 8 to 10s.; for three thousand metres (one mile seven furlongs), 3m. 34 to 35s.; for four thousand metres (two miles and a half), 4m. 30 to 35s. The distance of the Prix Gladiateur (six thousand two hundred metres or three and three-quarter miles one furlong)--the longest in France--is generally accomplished in 8m. 5 to 6s., though Mon Etoile has done it in 7m. 25s. But the mean speed, as we have said, has been raised since 1872, as it has been in America. But let us come back to our Norman circuit, which this digression about time and trotting interrupted at Rouen. The sleepy old mediaeval town on this occasion rouses itself from its dreams of the past and awakens to welcome the crowd of Norman farmers who come flocking in, clad for the most part in the national blue blouse, but still bearing about their persons those unmistakable though quite indescribable marks by which the turfman can recognize at a glance and under any costume the man whose business is with horses. Every trade and calling in life perhaps may be said to impart to its followers some distinguishing peculiarity by which the brethren of the craft at least will instinctively know each other; and amongst horse-fanciers these mysterious signs of recognition are as infallible as the signals of Freemasonry. As one penetrates still farther into Normandy on his way to the Caen races--which come off a few days after those at Rouen--one becomes still more alive to the fact that he is in a great horse-raising country. It is indeed to the departments of Calvados and the Orne beyond all other places that we owe those fine Norman stallions of which so many have been imported into America. In the Pin stud, at the fairs of Guibray and of Montagne, one may see the descendants of the colossal Roman-nosed horses of Merlerault and Cotentin which used to bear the weight of riders clad in iron, and which figure at a later day in the pictures of Van der Meulen. The infusion of English blood within the present century, and particularly during the Second Empire, has profoundly modified the character of the animal known to our ancestors: the Norman, with the rest of the various races once so numerous in France, is rapidly disappearing, and it will not be very long before two uniform types only will prevail--the draught-horse