18 EASTERN SIRES. 



32. — The satisfactory result of tlie first cross with Eastern 

 blood, soon led to a great deal of attention being given to the 

 importation of the best Eastern horses. Cromwell for war, and 

 Charles II. for sport, both sent emissaries to the East in search 

 of good horses. The Barb seems to have been chietly used, 

 though often under the name of the Turk or the Arabian. There 

 is much confusion in the manner in which names were applied 

 at this period, not in accordance with the strain of the horses 

 used, but after the name of the country from which they 

 happen to have been imi^orted. Some twenty Oriental horses are 

 known to have been used in the formation of the Thoroughbred 

 between 1620 to 1750, but the pedigree of no English horse 

 can be reliably traced back farther than to Place's White Turk 

 about 1655. Place was Cromwell's stud master, and like all 

 Cromwell's officers, no doubt understood his business. His 

 horse, the White Turk, is known to have been the sire of several 

 horses and mares to which some of our best stock is now traced. 

 The right quantity of Oriental blood seems to have been infused 

 into the English stock, and a new breed of a fixed character 

 formed in little more than one hundred years. No further 

 infusion of Eastern blood has succeeded. All late experiments in 

 that direction have entirely failed, and the superior speed and 

 staying power of the English Thoroughbred Horse is now so 

 undoubted, that no cross whatever can be adopted without 

 deterioration. 



.3.3. — Flying Childers and Eclipse, the one foaled 1715, the 

 other in 1764, are popularly believed to have been the fastest 

 horses that ever existed. They appear to have been the fastest 

 horses of their own day, but the records of their performances 

 against time do not come down to us with the same, or with 

 equal guarantees of accuracy, as those which have been adopted 

 in the records of public events in the present century. In 1771, 

 Richard Berenger, in his " History and Art of Horsemanship," 

 says, " The finer and better sort of the more modern English 

 horses are descended from Arabians and Barbs, and frequently 

 resemble their sires in appearances, bnt differ from them 

 considerably in size and mould, being more furnished, stout, and 



