INVESTIGATION OF DISPUTED PEDIGREES. 447 



wherever I meet it. As a satisfaction and guide to breeders in 

 the future it is important to know just how the early stock were 

 bred, although they may have belonged to past generations. A 

 breeder never can know too much of the lines in which he is 

 operating. This great horse was a good chestnut, with a star 

 and left hind foot white. He was stout, with heavy limbs, and 

 somewhat coarse, and not of the best quality, but possibly better 

 than the average of the Durocs. He was a fraction of an inch 

 below fifteen two. He was foaled 1814, got by Duroc, son of im- 

 ported Diomed; dam Miller's Damsel, by imported Messenger; 

 grandam a mare by PotSos, imported by Mr. Constable along 

 with the horse Baronet, in 1795. This is just as far as we can go 

 with any certainty, and this leaves the greatest race horse of his 

 day far short of being thoroughbred. When Mr. Constable 

 bought the PotSos mare in England he got no certificate of 

 pedigree, but he was told there she was out of a mare by Gim- 

 crack. Mr. Cadwallader R. Colden was the best-informed man 

 of his day on the history, blood, and performances of the blood- 

 horse, was a very intimate and warm friend of Mr. Constable, and 

 he did everything that could be done to straighten out and ex- 

 tend this pedigree, but he utterly failed. He thought it proba- 

 ble that the mare was thoroughbred, but he believed the Gim- 

 crack cross was a fiction. Some eighteen or twenty years ago, 

 when in London, Mr. Tattersall suggested to me that if Lord 

 Grosvenor bred a filly by Pot8os in 1792 that was thoroughbred, 

 there could hardly be a doubt that she was entered in some of 

 the stakes for three-year-olds. Then and there we searched the 

 old records, but nothing could be found to support the supposed 

 pedigree. It was not till 1832 that any special effort was made 

 to establish the pedigree through the press, and in January of 

 that year the famous Patrick Nesbit Edgar, of North Carolina, 

 wrote as follows to Mr. Skinner, editor of the American lurf 

 Register : 



"The authority I had for sending the remote pedigree of American Elipse 

 for publication was that it was furnished me lately by a gentleman in Eng- 

 land, who put himself to uncommon pains to procure it. He resides near 

 Bath, in that country. All the authority requisite I have at this time in my 

 possession. The PotSos mare was got by PotSos; her dam, foaled in 1778, by 

 Gimcrack, out of Snap-Dragon, sister to Angelica by Snap. (See English Stud 

 Book.)" 



Mr. Edgar wrote more on the same subject, after he was 



