I am endeavouring to pick with them, and I bring it forward here in an earnest endeavour to draw the attention of owners to the matter. Many of them are unaware of the facts of the case, and the sooner they learn them the better. In this ideal country of ours we ought to be able to breed the best racehorses in the whole wide world, and we should certainly be able to rear our own sires, with the assistance of occasional infusions of English blood. Search the columns of the weekly sporting press and scan the advertisements of “Sires of the Season.” In one paper I see close on eighty blood stallions advertised. With the exception of about half a dozen these are all imported. In another publication there are seventy, and the same proportion of country breeds stands to the imported stuff. And yet, what strains we have owned in the days that have gone by! Sound, stout, masculine, running strains. But they have run out, and they are vanished away. And it must be confessed with the deepest regret that a great number of the army of blood sires which we have been importing for the last twenty years are not sound, are not stout, are the reverse of masculine, although they do possess some of the greatest running blood in all the earth. My own deliberate opinion is that, for a decade, at least, we should drop this extravagant importation, put our own house in better order, and show the world once more what we can do in the way of producing our own sound, stout, fleet and staying, high-couraged but sensible Australian horse. Chapter XII. Great Australian Horses. The Barb v. Carbine. For we did produce, once upon a time, animals fit to take their places in the ranks against the greatest that the world could bring. Although the Hon. James White failed in his patriotic invasion, many individual racers reached the shores of Great Britain and showed the racing world what we are really capable of.