448 THE HORSE OF AMEEICA. 



pressed to it by Mr. Golden, hut he failed to produce any evi- 

 dence whatever that he was telling the truth. According to his 

 representations his correspondence on the subject had been very 

 extensive, and he complained that he had paid out forty shillings 

 in postage. 



It will be observed how cleverly Mr. Edgar conceals the sources 

 of his information while he pretends to give them, and that has 

 been the favorite i 'dodge" of all rascally "pedigree makers" 

 from that day till the present. Mr. Constable always insisted 

 that the mare was bred by Lord Grosvenor, and that she was by 

 PotSos, but he did not insist that she was out of a mare by Gim- 

 crack. As Lord Grosvenor was one of the most prominent of 

 all breeders of race horses in his day, and as he evidently kept 

 the records of his stud with more care than most of his contem- 

 poraries, we might reasonably expect to find some trace of this 

 mare if she was thoroughbred. After a careful and diligent 

 search of all the records of that period, it is found that Lord 

 Grosvenor never bred a Gimcrack filly to PotSos. This disposes 

 of Mr. Edgar's humbug story, and when we state the pedigree of 

 American Eclipse we can simply say he was got by Duroc; dam 

 Miller's Damsel by Messenger, and grandam the imported PotSos 

 mare, and there we must stop. 



For years past I have observed that the less a man knows about 

 horse history and horse achievements, the more importance he 

 attaches to the word "thoroughbred ;" and of all the millions 

 and millions of lies that have been told about pedigrees 

 nine-tenths have been concocted and circulated for the one 

 purpose of enhancing the supposed value of the animal by claim- 

 ing "thoroughbred" blood. The "instinct" to lie about pedi- 

 grees, so common among certain classes of horsemen, seems to 

 be "the sum of inherited habits" that has come down from gen- 

 eration to generation. If you ask one of these mendacious gen- 

 tlemen whether American Eclipse was a thoroughbred he will 

 answer, with a strong marked expression of contempb and pity 

 for your ignorance on his countenance, "Certainly he was thor- 

 oughbred." If you then ask him about his pedigree he will answer, 

 "I don't know anything about his pedigree." Then you ven- 

 ture to ask how he knows he was thoroughbred if he does not 

 know anything about his pedigree, and he will squelch you com- 

 pletely by saying, "No horse not thoroughbred could ever have 

 done what American Eclipse did." Here we get at the real basis 



