Admiration always leads to exaggeration. This is true in most of the relations of life, but in our admiration of the horse it becomes greatly intensified, so greatly indeed that in magnifying his excellent qualities we find ourselves telling downright falsehoods about him before we know it. This “amiable weakness,” as we might call it, is true of our everyday life and our everyday horses; but when we come to the horse that is the universal ideal of perfection, everybody seems to lay aside all the restraints of truth in extolling the superiority of his qualities. The “Arabian horse” is the ideal horse of all the world. He is the “gold standard” in all horsedom, with the one important distinction that the one is real and the other is mythical. Not one so-called horseman in a million ever saw a genuine Arabian horse, nor any of the descendants of one; and in all the discussions of the past three hundred and fifty years it has never been shown in a single instance that a horse from Arabia, with an authenticated pedigree and tracing as such, has ever been of any value, either as a race horse or as a progenitor of race horses. The superior qualities of “the Arabian horse,” like the superior qualities of “The Arabian Nights,” are purely works of the imagination. There is just as much truth in the stories of Sindbad the Sailor and Aladdin’s Lamp as there is in most of the literature relating to the Arabian horse. I am fully satisfied that these views of the Arabian horse will not meet with a ready acceptance by the vast majority of the horsemen of this or any other country, but my reasons for presenting them will become apparent as the discussion progresses. They smash too many idols and dispel too many chimeras of the brain to be readily accepted. It takes the average man a long time to get clear of the prejudices in which he was born, and the first question that will be asked by the doubter is, “Why could not Arabia have supported a race of indigenous wild horses, as well as any other country?” Because the horse, wild or tame, has never learned to dig a well forty feet deep, nor to draw water after it is dug. Neither has he learned to lay up a store in time of plenty against a time of famine. The horse could not live in Arabia without the care of man. And, second, “Why were all the civilized and semi-civilized nations west of Asia supplied with horses a thousand years before Arabia, when so near the original habitat of the horse?” It is the first law of our nature to supply ourselves with what we need. The camel always has been a necessity to the Arab, not only to carry him and his burdens, but to furnish nourishment and sustenance to him and his family. The camel is adapted to the country and the country to the camel, and no other created animal can fill that place. He is, literally, “the ship of the desert.” The horse in Arabia is a luxury that can be indulged in only by the rich;