And we have gained in speed. There can be little doubt of that. If the inexorable test of the “Winning Post” has not compelled us to breed from our best, and if, in the course of the flying centuries, the result has not been a march upwards, then Heaven help us and our methods. But do you think that stamina and soundness have improved along with our size and our speed? That, too, is hard to tell. And yet it is probable that it is so. Races now are real tests of the stayer. In the days of Fisherman, and Voltigeur, The Flying Dutchman, Plenipotentiary, Bay Middleton, and before their time, races were not run in a manner to prove stamina. More frequently there was much loitering on the way in the two, three, and four mile bouts between the steeds of our ancestors. To-day we run the two miles all the way from pillar to post, and Archer’s three minutes and fifty-two seconds for the Melbourne Cup has dwindled to the three twenty-four and a half claimed by Artilleryman. Twenty-seven seconds difference means at least two furlongs, and that takes catching. Well, admitting that we have marched forwards in the matter of both speed and stamina, surely there is much more unsoundness to-day than there was one hundred years ago, or even fifty years since. At the first blush one would say “Yes.” But on second thoughts one does not feel quite so sure. Herod was “a bleeder,” and bleeding has been not uncommon in his descendants. It is one hundred and sixty-four years ago since Herod was foaled. We rear regiments of racers now, where our forebears bred squadrons. And yet “bleeding” is not so very rife after all. But we hear more about it, with an active press focussing its microscope on every individual racer in the land. And roaring, you ask? Well, Pocahontas roared, and Prince Charlie made a fearful noise, and Belladrum was indistinguishable from a fog-horn, and Ormonde did more than whistle, but in Australia, at least, this is a defect, an actual unsoundness, which we do not so very often see—or hear. But we are breeding bad knees, bad feet, and round joints, and with the extra weight of the enlarged frames, ligaments and muscles cannot bear the strain. Yet this was always so. Bay Middleton had a mysterious foot and leg, Whalebone’s near fore-foot was contracted, and all were “pumiced”—whatever that might mean. He was “the most double-jointed horse I ever saw in my life,” was the verdict of that celebrity’s groom. Whitelock was “a naggish horse with a big, coarse head and plumb forelegs.” Flat, thin-soled feet were the “bane of lazy Lanercost,” Rataplan “always went proppy on his long fore pasterns,” and “Dundee’s suspensory ligament went so badly in the Derby that after that race his fetlock nearly touched the ground.” Partisan had a “clubby foot.” Touchstone had “very fleshy legs,” and his “near fore ankle was never very good.” And so on we could go, from the Adam of horses to our own most rapid, modern times, which these grandchildren of ours will shortly