very much the same in appearance, action and blood. On this basis of reasoning, which involves no improbabilities, we may conclude that the same proportion of the horses from Picardy were natural pacers. There is another theory, giving the Canadian pacer an Anglo-American origin, that commends itself to the unbiased judgment with even greater force than the one just suggested. Various writers have talked about the “French characteristics” of the Canadian pacer, and all that, when probably not one of them ever saw a horse that he _knew_ to be French. The early pacers—the pacing-bred pacers—all have more or less strongly marked resemblances, especially in conformation, and it makes no difference whether they come from Canada or whether their habitat has been south of Mason and Dixon’s line for two hundred and fifty years. When we look at a pacer, therefore, we may as well be honest and say we don’t know whether he resembles the horses that reached the St. Lawrence in 1665, or those that reached Massachusetts Bay in 1629. The theory that the French Canadians got the foundation of their pacing stock from the New England colonies rests upon two well-known facts. First, the colonies had a great abundance of such horses for sale; and second, they were within reach of and purchasable by the Canadians. To these two facts rendering the theory possible, we have others which render it probable. The jealous restrictions sought to be imposed on both the English and French colonists by the home governments of both people strongly indicate that there was no small amount of illicit trading, and this trading, in the very nature of things, must have been between the English and French. Toward the close of the seventeenth century the English colonies, especially Rhode Island, had far more horses than they needed for home use, and they did a thriving business in exporting them to different parts. These were just the kind of horses the Canadians needed for their wild life in the wilderness; they were cheaper than they could be brought from France; the water way of Lake Champlain was convenient; pelts and furs were a desirable commodity of exchange, and there was no cordon of customs officers to keep the willing traders apart. Of these theories we consider the second the more probable of the two, and if we accept it we reach the conclusion that the so-called “French” Canadian pacer is merely a descendant of the old English pacer brought over by the early New England colonists. Objection has been presented to this theory, on the grounds that the powerful confederation of the Six Nations Indians interposed an insurmountable barrier to all trade, whether legitimate or illicit, between the Canadians and the colonists of New England. This objection is certainly conclusive as applied to the different periods of hostilities, but the hostilities were not continuous. During both the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries there were periods of