88 THE HORSE OF AMERICA. 



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 effect- 

 ive 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. But notwith- 

 standing the unsatisfactory plan of its construction, it has been 

 honestly compiled, and we may safely accept its contents, back 

 as far as the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Mr. 

 Weatherby began his work; but when we reach the period of th& 

 eighteenth century, facts, fables and frauds are so inextricably 

 mixed that whatever we accept must be cum grano salis. Be- 

 yond that period Mr. Weatherby furnishes nothing but the wild- 

 est fancies and traditions shaped up by those contributing them 

 with a view to lengthen a pedigree and a price accordingly. All 

 that we can ever know of the horses of that period we must- 

 gather from the little snatches dropped by contemporaneous his- 

 torians. 



In establishing his "General Stud Book, 17 Mr. Weatherby's 

 work may be compared to the building of an embankment around 

 a great field which contained all the race horses of the realm. They 

 were of all colors, all markings and all sizes, except the monster 

 cart horse and the diminutive Shetland. They had all raced or 

 possessed blood that had raced, and they all had pedigrees of 

 various lengths and various degrees of reliability. They all 

 walked and trotted and galloped, and there was not a pacer 

 among them, for the last pacer had disappeared from England 

 probably fifty years before this. The antagonism of the Saracenic 

 horse had triumphed, and that antagonism was bred in the blood 



