THE AMERICAN RACE HORSE. 103 



reputable people I accepted the information and stood by it as 

 the truth; and when I came to compare it with the representa- 

 tions of pedigree made in advertisements of some stallion scion 

 of the family, the truth began to dawn upon me that advertise- 

 ments, whether in newspapers or on crossroads blacksmith-shop 

 doors, with scarcely an exception, were made up of statements 

 that were utterly false and fictitious. They were made up for 

 the single purpose of securing patronage, and generally traced in 

 different directions to famous and well-known horses. The ficti- 

 tious extensions of stallion advertisements have served as the 

 basis for the fictitious extensions of families and tribes. When I 

 came to compare the extensions of trotting pedigrees with run- 

 ning pedigrees, I could not discover that the one was any more 

 or less reliable than the other. They rested on precisely the 

 same basis of stallion pedigrees, and no difference whether they 

 appeared in Mr. Skinner's Turf Register or in a big poster, there 

 was no censorship, and they were both in type and whatever 

 was in type was generally supposed to be worthy of belief. In 

 one respect the pedigrees of running horses are more reliable 

 than the early advertisements of trotting horses, particularly 

 with those that raced, for they were required to give the sire and 

 dam when they were entered in races, and a failure to comply 

 with this rule was penalized. The sires, therefore, are generally 

 right, but unfortunately the rule did not require the dam to be 

 named and definitely specified, hence any one of a dozen un- 

 named mares by a given horse could be represented in after years 

 as the dam of that particular horse. Here commenced the 

 trouble in the unnamed and untraced mares that never have 

 been nor ever can be identified. On a careful and sorrowful 

 review of my work of many years I found that I had been work- 

 ing on a wrong basis from the start. Instead of discovering and 

 arranging a great many valuable truths, as I supposed, I had de- 

 voted years to perpetuating thousands and thousands of fictions 

 in these unknown, unnamed, and unidentified dams. This is the 

 reason the second volume of "Wallace's American Stud Book" 

 never was published. The only benefit I ever derived from the 

 work was in its educational aspects. The work made me familiar 

 with the early running-horse history of this country and of Eng- 

 land, and taught me what so many horsemen should learn that 

 a truth is always better than a lie. The more carefully and thor- 

 oughly I went into the origin, lineage and history of what we 



