NEW JERSEY is not known to have made any direct importations of horses from the old country. Lying between New York on the east and Pennsylvania on the west, she had abundant opportunity to get her supply of horses from her neighbors on either side, to say nothing of the overflow from Virginia about 1669. Like all the other colonies, as early as 1668 her horses were ordered to be branded and then suffered to roam at large and find their own living. Not much attention seems to have been given to the idea of improvement in the size and quality of the stock till 1731, when it was provided by law that all colts of eighteen months old, running at large and under fourteen hands high, should be gelded. I have not made any attempt to get at the exact average size of the Jersey horses, nor to ascertain the ratio of pacers among them, for we know the environments and the sources of supply, and in knowing these we know just what the Jersey horses were—a large majority of them were pacers and they were not over fourteen hands high. The statutes of this colony, enacted 1748, furnished the first real evidence of record, with one exception, going to show that pacing and trotting races, as well as running races, were the common amusement of the people in the first half of the last century. They were so common, indeed, that the legislative authorities declared them a nuisance and restricted them to certain days in the year. That this was not a “moral spasm,” as some might call it, that had seized the legislative authorities of that particular year, is evident from the fact that, afterward and from time to time, this statute was amended, and always in the direction of greater restrictions and greater severity. This is sufficient evidence that the moral sense of the community sustained the lawmakers in pronouncing it a nuisance, to be abated. It is not probable that pacing and trotting races were any more common or more demoralizing in New Jersey than in some of the other colonies, but they seem to have been content with fulminating against “horse racing” without specifying the different gaits at which the horses might go in the race. Until this old colonial statute was discovered, it was not possible to prove by contemporaneous evidence that there had been any pacing or trotting races before the first decade of the present century. This, however, adds to their antiquity more than a hundred years.