ArPEXDIX. 



noTious crop. "Besides all this, I can show that AtlniiiMl Rous 

 whenever he mounts his hobby of the necessity of early training 

 and a great deal of two-year old racing, puts forward statementa 

 and draws inferences which are absurd. In a late letter to the 

 London Times he berates somebody who has had the audacity and 

 hardihood to lament the prevalence of roaring as an evil, and to 

 suggest that the running of animals so very young might partly 

 acco'int for a good deal of it. What is the Admiral's answer? 

 Why. the declaration that Eclipse was a roarer, and that the dis- 

 ease does not prevail in the tropics. Having been a sailor once 

 myself, I am ashamed of this specimen of quarter-deck logic. In 

 the first place the story that Eclipse was a roarer rests upon noth- 

 ing but a foolish tradition. St. Bel, the veterinary surgeon who 

 set up his skeleton, and Godwin, another veterinary surgeon who 

 often rode the old horse to water when he stood for mares at The 

 Cannons, both denied it. O'Kelly and Wildman who owned 

 Eclipse, and Oakly who rode him, denied it. The owner of Gold- 

 finder, a horse that never was beaten, who often talked of running 

 him against Eclipse, but took precious good care not to do it, also 

 denied it. Again, because roaring is not prevalent in tropical 

 countries Admiral Rous seems to think that no effort should be 

 made to abate it where it is prevalent. A man at Rio Janeiro, a 

 place often devastated by the yellow fever, proposes to take some 

 sanitary measures with a view to mitigate its virulence, and bring 

 about a decrease of sickness and death. Up jumps a Rear Ad- 

 miral and says, " What you propose is unnecessary, not to say mis- 

 chievous. The oldest man I ever knew had the yellow fever in 

 liis youth, besides which the disease is unknown in Greenland." 

 The argument is that it is necessary to gallop and try yearlings 

 and to train and run at two years old in order to have racehorses. 

 But many of the very best that ever ran were not tried and 

 trained and run in that way. These are Flying Childers and 

 Eclipse, Matchem, Goldfinder, Gimcrack and Pot-8-os : Bay Mal- 

 ton. Engineer and Mambrino ; Glencoe and Bay Middleton : B^s- 



