Another Australian innovation is the “Bruce Lowe Figure System.” This, too, has been the motive force of endless ink slinging. But, like the starting gate, it has come to stay. It is extremely simple. For a great number of years in the history of the Turf, breeders, with the exception of a few genuine enthusiasts, paid little attention to the family lines of their mares. They were aware that their stallion was an Eclipse horse, and was by so and so from so and so, but the dam, although a good one, did not trouble them much, on her dam’s side, so long as she was clean bred. I remember a discussion which took place long ago, instigated, I think, by the “Sportsman,” on “How to Breed a Good Racehorse.” I believe, but am not quite sure whether I am right, that it was the late General Peel who promulgated the appallingly simple doctrine to “put a winner of the Oaks to the winner of the Leger, and there you are, don’t you know.” But of later years, and before Mr. Bruce Lowe had published his “system,” men were beginning to waken up to the supreme importance of the dam, and her family, and the revised edition of the first volume of the “General Stud Book” was an incentive to the seekers after truth to persevere in their studies. Bruce Lowe was struck with the fact that descendants of certain of the old “Royal” and other mares—the “tap-roots,” as he called them—in tail female, of our “Stud Book,” were infinitely more successful than the descendants of other tap-root mares. Mr. Bruce Lowe, and his friend, Mr. Frank Reynolds, had noticed the same peculiarity in their Shorthorn herds of cattle, namely, that the produce of certain cows from some particular old original matron of the herd, continued to be superior to the produce of others. And this animal they called No. 1. Mr. Lowe then went into an exhaustive analysis of the winning families of the British thoroughbred racer, and he took, as a standard of excellence, the winning of the great classic three-year-old events which have been in existence for so many years, and a record of which is easily found and referred to. After tabulating these, and running them all out to the original tap-root mare, he discovered that more Derbies, Legers, and Oaks had been won by the descendants, in tail female, of Tregonwell’s Natural Barb mare, than by the offspring, in direct female line, of any other original mare in the “General Stud Book.” The same standard placed Burton’s Barb mare second, and Dam of the Two True Blues third. There are some fifty of these mares contained in the sacred pages of Volume I., and Bruce Lowe identified them by the figure denoting the place they held in his standard of Derby, Leger, and Oaks wins. Thirty-eight of them are responsible for classic winners, and after No. 38, the remainder have been given a figure in an arbitrary manner purely, until Miss Euston is reached, who is No. 50. It is a little peculiar that the last of these mares to