A careful study of the chapter on the English Race Horse will present to the minds of all my intelligent readers the consideration of several points to which they will be slow in yielding assent. These points run up squarely against the preconceived opinions and prejudices of two centuries, and these preconceived opinions and prejudices are well-nigh universal. The first point upon which the public intelligence has gone wrong is in the general belief that horse-racing had its origin in the seventeenth century, when Charles II. was restored to his throne. The truth is we have accounts of racing by contemporaneous historians in the twelfth century, and indeed, we might say from the time of the Romans in Britain. To go back four centuries, however, is far enough to answer our present purpose. After selecting, breeding, and racing four hundred years we must conclude that the English had some pretty good race horses. This is fully verified by the writers at the close of Queen Elizabeth’s reign as well as at the beginning of Charles II.’s. They had native English horses that were able to beat all the imported exotics, including the Arabian owned by King James. We must, therefore, conclude that the race horse was not created by Charles II., but that racing was simply revived by him, after the restrictions of Cromwell’s time, and that the old English blood was the basis of that revival. The importations of so many exotics in his reign were simply so many reinforcements of the old English racing blood.