THE AMERICAN RACE HORSE. 95 



untruth, and its universal use does not redeem it from its es- 

 sence of deception and fraud. It must be conceded, however, 

 that this deception may have sprung from bad teaching and 

 ignorance rather than from a depraved moral sense, for many 

 people, as well as the poets and the novelists, may have concluded 

 that as the nations named above got their religion from Arabia, 

 so they got their horse stock from the same country, and thus 

 the horses brought from Turkey, or Syria, or Egypt, or Spain, 

 or Morocco, or any of the Barbary States, are descendants of the 

 Arabian horse and thus entitled to the name " Arabian." This 

 seems to be the only theory upon which this universal misrepre- 

 sentation can be palliated. Let us repeat a sentence or two here, 

 to show what history reveals on this point. Strabo says there 

 were no horses in Arabia at the beginning of the Christian era. 

 Philostorgius says that in the year 356, two hundred "well-bred" 

 (Jappadocian horses were sent as a present to the prince of 

 Yemen, by the Emperor Constantius. These were the first 

 horses in Arabia. In the days of Mohammed horses were ex- 

 ceedingly scarce in Arabia, and they have remained so to the 

 present time. The horse is an expensive exotic in Arabia, as he 

 is never used for any domestic purpose, nor for any other pur- 

 pose except robbery or display. For all domestic and commercial 

 uses the camel is far better. All the countries named above were 

 abundantly supplied with horses, at least eight hundred or a 

 thousand years before there were any horses in Arabia. The 

 Moslems got their religion from Arabia, but not their horses. 

 This topic is more fully discussed in the chapter on the Arabian 

 horse. 



The importation of English race horses to this side of the 

 water commenced about the year 1750, and that being the mid- 

 dle of the last century it is easy to remember the date when the 

 line was drawn between the old and the new elements appearing 

 on the race course. The following six animals were brought over 

 within a year or two of that date Monkey, Traveller, Dabster, 

 Childers, Badger, and Janus. A few others might be named, 

 but some at least are mythical. Of those here named, Traveller 

 was the great horse. Janus became the progenitor of a tribe of 

 very fast quarter horses, and although he did not found that 

 tribe, which had been in existence for a hundred years on the 

 border line between Virginia and North Carolina, he doubtless 

 improved it. Monkey was twenty-two years old when he came 



