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These " half-milers " are not necessarily bad horses because 

 they cannot go any further at the pace, and some of them, if 

 trained differently, are capable of winning long races. 



A study of the early volumes of the Stud Book reveals the 

 fact that no pedigree can be traced back more than about 

 two hundred years, and that, except in the case of a horse 

 by an imported sire out of an imported mare, many of the 

 earlier ancestors of any and every thoroughbred are lost in 

 obscurity. By way of example let us take the famous 

 Eclipse, who was never beaten in his running days, and from 

 whom — as will be shown later on — a large majority of the 

 great horses of the present day are directly descended. 

 Eclipse, in direct tail male, was the great-great-grandson of 

 the Darley Arabian, and of course in this direction his pedi- 

 gree ends with the most famous of all the imported sires. 

 His great-great-grandsire was Bartlett's Childers by the Darley 

 Arabian out of Betty Leedes, and Betty Leedes was by Old 

 Careless out of Sister to Leedes by the Leedes Arabian (im- 

 ported) out of a daughter of Spanker and Spanker's dam. 

 Here in this direction the pedigree ends, as far as tabulated 

 particulars are concerned,* but according to the Stud Book 

 (vol.i.) Spanker was by the D'Arcy Yellow Turk (imported) out 

 of Lord Fairfax's Morocco Barb — Bold Peg, an Arabian mare. 



Old Careless, the sire of Betty Leedes, was by this same 

 Spanker out of a Barb mare, and therefore from his great- 

 grandsire (Bartlett's Childers) Eclipse can be traced to 

 imported Eastern horses quite clearly. We now go back 

 to Eclipse's grandsire, Squirt, who was out of Sister to Old 

 Country Wench, who was by Snake out of Grey Wilkes by 

 Hautboy, her dam Miss D'Arcy's Pet mare, whose sire is 

 unknown, but who was the daughter of a Sedbury Royal 

 mare. Very likely the Pet mare was by an imported 

 Eastern or the son of such a sire, but none of the old records 

 give the name, and thus the pedigree of Eclipse is incomplete 

 in its sixth remove. Then Snake — so called because he was 

 bitten by some venomous animal, and could not be trained — 

 was by The Lister Turk out of a daughter of Hautboy ; but 

 we do not know now how this daughter of Hautboy was 



* See the Horsebreeders Handbook, by Joseph Osborne ("Beacon"). 



