long-inherited habit of action, and although buried in non-pacing blood, as supposed, for two or three generations, the pace is liable to appear again, at any time. So it was, doubtless in English experiences, but as the revolution was not retarded by the development of pacing speed, in one hundred years from the restoration, in 1660, there was no longer a pacer on British soil. When the first Mr. Weatherby assumed the task of making and keeping a registry of English race horses, he seems to have had only a very faint conception of the magnitude of the undertaking. The first volume of his “General Stud Book” was published in 1803, and when it appeared it was found to contain so many things that were not true that the necessary work of revision and excision reduced its contents fearfully. In these eliminations he started in with a free hand, as is shown by comparison with later editions, but soon found that his book was disappearing very rapidly, and not much of it would be left, if he did not stay his hand. At this point he seems to have adopted some new rule, unfortunately, either of evidence or of date, probably the latter, for his work discloses the fact that he declined all responsibility for pedigrees as they came to him, of an earlier period than about 1780. Beyond that date nearly all the crude and impossible things of fiction were allowed to remain and are thus propagated as true, down to our own day. There was one rule, however, adopted very early in the management of this compilation that saved it from degeneracy, and that was the difficulty of getting into it. In all its history, from the beginning, it has been a kind of “close corporation,” and the animals in the volume of the last year are almost uniformly descended from the animals to be found in the first volume. The application of this rule, no doubt, worked an injustice in very many cases, but it made the English race horse a BREED, pre-eminent above all other horses for his unequaled speed as a running horse. This general rule restricting admissions to the descendants of such as had places in preceding volumes seems to have been followed and maintained with a good share of rigidity, by the different generations of the Weatherby family, in whose hands the compilation still remains. Whatever may have been the ratio of fables and forgeries in the first volume, they were there compacted and neither the Weatherbys nor the breeders have been much annoyed with them since. The plan of the Stud Book itself is very unsatisfactory to the careful student, for the reason that it admits of no details of breeder, owner, etc., that are of vital importance in tracing and identifying an unknown or disputed pedigree. While the plan is very desirable and effective in placing the produce of mares underneath the dams, it is very defective in relation to breeders, and subsequent owners. Unless the identity of the animal can be traced and established by the records, the pedigree is always doubtful.