This remark is simply amazing in an author who pretentiously undertakes to instruct his countrymen in the history of the horse when he knows nothing about that history. If he had gone back only twenty-two years, “Old John Lawrence,” in his splendid quarto, would have told him about the pacer. If he had gone back one hundred and sixty years, the Duke of Newcastle would have explained to him the complete and perfect mechanism of the pacing gait. If he had gone still further back and examined Gervaise Markham, Blundeville, Polydore Virgil, and Fitz Stephen the Monk, of the twelfth century, any and all of them would have explained to him the pacing habit of action and shown him that for many successive centuries the pacing horse was the popular and fashionable horse of the realm. If Mr. Youatt had lived to see John R. Gentry pace a mile in 2:00½; Robert J. in 2:01½, and dozens of others in less than 2:10, he might have changed his mind and concluded that it was possible, after all, for a horse to travel at the lateral gait without toppling over. From Mr. Youatt and a few other modern English authors, most of our American writers on the horse have derived what little mental pabulum they thought they needed, and thus an error at the fountain has been carried into all the ramifications of our horse literature. Only two or three years ago a very intelligent gentleman, who had attained great eminence as a veterinary surgeon, especially for his knowledge and treatment of the horse’s foot, seriously and in good faith stoutly maintained that the pacing habit of action was merely the result of an abnormal condition of the foot, and that all pacers would trot just as soon as their feet were put in the right shape. We must not laugh at this wild notion, for it is really no worse than Mr. Youatt’s doubting whether it was possible for a horse to balance himself at the lateral motion. Neither gentleman seemed to know anything about the fact that it was a matter of inheritance, and that the lateral habit of action had come down by transmission through all the generations for a period of more than two thousand years. It is hardly necessary to say that the gentleman who was so confident that the pace was merely the result of the abnormal condition of the feet brought his notions about the pacer from across the water. He was an Anglo-American, and could make a pacer into a trotter in a jiffy, by using the paring-knife. He was an intelligent man and a skillful veterinarian, but there were no pacers in England and there should be none here. Toward the close of the chapter on The Colonial Horses of Virginia, will be found the observations of an English tourist in 1795-96 who is very certain that there is some mistake about the pacer, and will not be convinced there are any, unless they are artificially created. Having now completed what I had to say about the old English pacer, it is next in order to consider his descendants in