104 THE HOKSE OF AMERICA. 



may call the modem race horse, the more evident it became to 

 my mind that the great mass of the running horses of our own 

 generation are carrying, in their pedigrees, the frauds and fic- 

 tions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to say nothing 

 of the innumerable deceptions and tricks of our own century. 

 To accept and propagate these untruths is simply to, in a man- 

 ner, indorse them, and an attempt to eliminate them would in- 

 voke the clamors of a continent. Hence, more than twenty years 

 ago, I washed my hands of all responsibility for the pedigrees of 

 English race horses, and turned my attention to establishing the 

 lineage of the American trotter, on sure foundations, and build- 

 ing him up into a breed. 



The third attempt at compiling the pedigrees of running-bred 

 horses was made by Mr. Sanders D. Bruce, of New York, and as 

 it followed Edgar and Wallace, it was made up chiefly of what he 

 found in these works. The conscienceless fictions of Edgar were 

 accepted without hesitation or remorse, and the central aim 

 seemed to be to make every pedigree as long as possible, whether 

 true or false. No fictitious stallion advertisement was ever too 

 absurd to serve as a basis for the pedigrees of all his kindred. 

 Mr. Bruce accepted everything and rejected nothing, and it is 

 not probable he ever investigated a pedigree in his life. His 

 rule of action seems to have been to please his customers, and to 

 scrupulously avoid all public discussions of pedigrees. This was 

 the politic course to pursue, for any attempt to defend the mon- 

 strosities it contained would have wiped it out of existence very 

 quickly. Bruce's Stud Book seems to have been supported by a 

 few individuals, from the beginning, as a kind of eleemosynary 

 institution, and it is not likely it will ever rise above that condi- 

 tion. 



The substantial correctness of the generations extending 

 back for a period of sixty or eighty years, and in some cases 

 even a little further, is a very valuable contribution to our store 

 of knowledge in this department of industry, but, unfortunately, 

 the generations beyond those that may be classed as recent very 

 largely rest upon foundations that are fictitious and fraudu- 

 lent. 



These fictions and frauds are so general and common in 

 the remote extensions on the female side of the pedigree that 

 when we find a string of ten or perhaps twenty dams and not one 



