INTRODUCTION 



CONSIDERATIONS much more important than mere 

 chronological coincidence render appropriate the issue, 

 at the commencement of a new century, of a work having 

 for its subject the English Turf The coincidence lies in the 

 fact that the changes in the conduct of racing which have 

 been so accelerated during the last quarter of the nineteenth 

 century have attained to a culminating point at the very 

 close of it. The changes have been a mere matter of natural 

 evolution, but they have not been the less marked for that, 

 and the septuagenarian race-goer finds himself in practically 

 a new world when he compares the racing of to-day with 

 what it was in his youth. Some features of racing are not 

 adaptable to variation, but it may be safely said that where 

 change has been possible, there it has been brought about. 

 The Turf commences a new century of existence in a form 

 vastly different from that it assumed as the eighteenth 

 century merged into the nineteenth ; but it is not at all 

 probable, when another hundred years have passed, that 

 a revolution correspondingly great will be found to have 

 taken place. In its main features racing in England has 

 taken a shape from which there can be but few departures, 

 and which may be regarded as permanent. Minor details 

 will from time to time meet with embellishments, but the 

 scheme that has been so laboriously evolved must remain as 

 it now is. A book descriptive of the Turf written a quarter 

 of a century since would have been out of date in a few 



