THE AMERICAN RACE HORSE. 99 



or to the world ( except the mere fact that he was the founder of 

 the first sporting paper in this country. In course of time the 

 paper with all its belongings became the property of John 

 Richards, the former pressman, and Mr. Porter had to look for a 

 living wherever he could find it. Mr. George Wilkes then took 

 him under his wing, and started a new sporting paper called 

 Porter's Spirit of the Times. The use of this name carried 

 with it the support of a good many friends, but as he was not 

 able to write anything, practically, for the new paper, from its 

 very commencement in September, 1856, it failed to yield any 

 support to Mr. Porter, and not much to Mr. Wilkes and his 

 partners. Litigation arose and Mr. Wilkes finally withdrew from 

 Porter's Spirit of the Times, and started Wilkes' Spirit of the 

 the Times in September, 1859. We then had three sporting 

 papers all claiming to be the original and only legitimate Spirit 

 of the Times. Among their readers they were distinguished as 

 the Old Spirit, Porters Spirit, and Wilkes' Spirit. The 

 circulation of the Old Spirit was largely in the Southern 

 States, and the war destroyed it, in 1861. Porter's Spirit "hew- 

 ing but little money and still less brains, died about the same 

 time. This left Mr. Wilkes in open possession of the field, and 

 his remarkably trenchant articles on the conduct of the war 

 gave Wilkes' Spirit of the Times a very wide circulation, even 

 among those who cared nothing for sporting matters. At the 

 same time he was fortunate in securing the services of Mr. 

 Charles J. Foster, an able writer on horse subjects, and a very 

 industrious and capable man in managing and discussing affairs 

 connected with the horse. Some years later, Mr. Wilkes dropped 

 his own name from the title of his paper, and not long afterward 

 he added twenty-five or thirty years to its age by changing the 

 numbers so as to cover the period of the original Spirit of the 

 Times founded by William T. Porter. The old sporting publica- 

 tions, one and all, maintained the view, so far as they ever had 

 any view to maintain, that all that was of any value in the 

 American horse, for whatever purpose, had come down to us 

 from the Arabian through the English race horse. Their value, 

 therefore, consists wholly in the naked statistics which they con- 

 tain. 



The first attempt made in this country, in the direction of 

 publishing a stud book of American race horses, was the product 

 of Patrick Xesbitt Edgar, an eccentric and apparently not well- 



