The Rev. James McSparran, D.D., was sent out by the London Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, to take charge of an Episcopal church that had been planted some years before in Rhode Island. He arrived in 1721, and lived till 1759. He was an Irishman, and appears to have been somewhat haughty and irascible in his temperament and was disposed to find fault with the climate, the currency, the people, and pretty much everything he came in contact with. He was a man of observation, and during the thirty-eight years he spent in ministering to the spiritual wants of his flock, he was not unmindful of what was passing around him, and made many notes and reflections on the various phases of life as they presented themselves to his mind, and especially on the products and industries of the colony. These notes and observations he wrote out, and they were published in Dublin in 1753, under the title of “America Dissected.” His writings do not discover that he was a man of very ardent piety, but he was honored as a good man while he lived, and was buried under the altar he had served so long. His duties sometimes called him away into Virginia, and, in speaking of the great distance of one parish from another, he uses the following language: “To remedy this (the distance), as the whole province, between the mountains, two hundred miles up, and the sea, is all a champaign, and without stones, they have plenty of a small sort of horses, the best in the world, like the little Scotch Galloways; and ’tis no extraordinary journey to ride from sixty to seventy miles or more in a day. I have often, but upon larger pacing horses, rode fifty, nay, sixty miles a day, even here in New England, where the roads are rough, stony and uneven.” The reverend gentleman seems to assume that his readers knew the Scotch Galloways were pacers, and with this explanation his observations are very plain. He makes no distinction between the Virginia horse and his congener of Rhode Island except that of size, in which the latter had the advantage. In speaking of the products of Rhode Island he says: “The produce of this colony is principally butter and cheese, fat cattle, wool, and fine horses, which are exported to all parts of English America. They are remarkable for fleetness and swift pacing; _and I have seen some of them pace a mile in a little more than two minutes, and a good deal less than three_.”