What was the extent of the influence of the speed of the old English race horse upon the new race horse that sprang up in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? This is a question that has not been very much discussed, but every intelligent and thinking man has given it more or less thought. Britain was not rapid in the progress of civilization and refinement, but through all the centuries of her history she had her race horses and she ran them. There can be no doubt that many of these native horses could outrun and outlast the best of the exotics that were brought in. None of those exotics, so far as we know, could run and win. Their value, then, was measured, not by what they could do themselves, but by what their progeny could do; and that progeny, at the foundation, carried half the blood of the old tribes. There were no racing calendars in the seventeenth century and none till the second decade of the eighteenth, and during all that time the blood of every man’s horse would, naturally, be fashionable blood. When the racing calendars were established they were a partial check upon untruthful representations, but this check only extended to the sire of the animal, and was then not always trustworthy. This left the whole maternal side open to all kinds of misrepresentation, and as the Anglo-Saxon race is fond of liberty, every man exercised the liberty of making his pedigrees to suit himself. Thus, through advertisements, sale papers, etc., great multitudes of fictitious pedigrees, all shaped on fashionable lines, gained currency and were propagated from owner to owner, from generation to generation. On this point I speak from the personal knowledge of a long lifetime in connection with such affairs in our own country, and I take it for granted that our English ancestors were no better and no worse than we are ourselves. This was the condition of things in England for about one hundred and fifty years, and when Mr. Weatherby was at work on the Stud Book he was overflowed with a flood of those bald-headed fictions, concocted by generations long past, and nobody could disprove them. In this way a large portion of the accumulated rubbish of past generations found its way into the English Stud Book and there it stands to-day, serving only to misguide the seeker after truth.