156 THE JOCKEY CLUB 1750- 



Jockey Club were partly statutory and partly tradi- 

 tional ; the former contained in an abstract of certain 

 Acts of Parliament, and the latter in a collection of 

 'Kules concerning Eacing in General,' published in 

 Pond's 'Kalendar' for 1751. Both the abstract and 

 the collection will be found — by whoever cares to read 

 them — in the Appendix. 



The Club having founded, as we have already 

 seen, two Jockey Club Plates to be run for by horses 

 belonging to its own members only, appears first of all 

 (in 1756) in the rare character of the physician who 

 heals himself. For one of these Plates was originally 

 run in heats, but it was found that the hereditary and 

 elective legislators who competed for it had so many 

 violent disputes over 'the posting of the horses, &c.,' 

 that the Club agreed to substitute for the three heats 

 a single heat, called by the Americans a 'dash,' a very 

 salutary example, recommended by the Club to the 

 Master of the Horse (in 1851) for Queen's Plates, but 

 not adopted for them until ten years later (in 1861), and 

 not even now expressly enforced in the rules of racing. 

 The only possible excuse for races in heats is such a 

 scarcity of horses that a sufficiency of sport could not 

 otherwise be insured. The case of dead heats might 

 be made exceptional. To the same year, 1756, belongs 

 a decision of the Jockey Club (in respect of placing 

 the horses in the Jockey Club Plate won by the Duke 

 of Ancaster's Spectator) which became a generally 

 but not universally received precedent, quoted in 1786 



