As we have no guide, either historic, linguistic or ethnographic, by which we can certainly determine the blood of the original inhabitants of the British Isles, it is not remarkable that we should be in profound ignorance as to the blood of their horses. They were, doubtless, like their masters, of mixed origin, and through all the centuries their appearance would indicate that they have been bred and reared in a nomadic or semi-wild state, in which only the toughest and fleetest had survived. A good many years ago I met with a theory, advanced by somebody, that the original horse stock of Britain came from the North, but there were no reasons given to support it. I have no hesitation in accepting this theory, as far as it distinguishes between the North and the South, for some Northern countries produce vast numbers of natural pacers, as Russia, for instance, but I have never learned that any Southern country produced pacers. Certainly the shaft horse of the Russian drosky has been a flying pacer for generations, and great numbers of them are produced in Russia, especially in the eastern part of the empire. As these pacers are produced in a natural and semi-wild state, it must be conceded that habits of action have been inherited from their ancestors in the remote past. Historically, we know that the Phœnicians, when they ruled the trade of the world, supplied the whole of the northern coast of Africa, from Egypt to Algiers, and the southern coast of Spain, with horses, about a thousand years before the Christian era. Now, the horses of those regions are the descendants of the original stock carried there by the Phœnicians, and we know their habit of action is not that of the pacer. Hence the conclusion that the English pacer came from the North and not from the South. In speaking of the difference in the gaits of Northern and Southern horses, Mr. John Lawrence specifies the horses of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, etc., and says: “They are round made, but with clean heads and limbs; their best pace is the trot (or pace), which indeed is the characteristic pace of the Northern, as the gallop is of the Southern horse.” Other writers speak of the trot (or pace) as common to Northern horses, but as not common to Southern horses. Now, as all Southern horses do trot, and as these writers could not fail to know that they trotted, at some rate of speed, we must construe their terms so as to be consistent with plain, common sense. There was something in the “trot” of the Northern horse altogether different from the “trot” of the Southern horse that rendered his habit of action more conspicuous, probably by his higher rate of speed, but still more probably by the peculiar mechanism of his lateral action. If we insert the word “pace” instead of the word “trot,” the meaning of these old writers becomes very plain and in harmony with other known facts. Neither does it militate against the theory that the inhabitants