INTRODUCTION 5 



Not a few of these animals can be found set down, with more or less 

 accuracy, in the eleven volumes of the American Trotting Register, in 

 the Breeders' Trotting Stud Book, in Wallace's American Stud Book, in 

 the works of Edgar or Herbert, or elsewhere. Many of them would be 

 found registered in a grossly inaccurate way, and, in nearly all, the au- 

 thor's guess would stand side by side with the ascertained fact, with no 

 mark to indicate which was the fact and which the guess. Great num- 

 bers of these pedigrees would not be found at all, as they have been 

 entered in no book of registration, and are to be discovered only by patient 

 examination of files of ancient newspapers, or by interviews with aged peo- 

 ple ; and this class of unregistered pedigrees is by no means confined to 

 obscure horses, but in it are some of the best. 



We early began arranging the information received as to such horses, not 

 Morgans, as entered into the Morgan pedigrees, with a view of giving what 

 could be learned of their pedigrees in an appendix to this volume. But we 

 soon learned that there was too much material for an appendix, and that there 

 was but one satisfactory course to pursue. The work must be made as full 

 and accurate as possible, must include all noted American Horses, so far as 

 known, and must be issued as a separate book. Such a work we have now 

 well towards completion, and it will be issued as soon after this as possible. 

 In it a great number of errors, many of them of long standing and connected with 

 horses of the first consequence, will be corrected. It will contain, also, in one 

 volume, or at the most in two, all the matter of interest now contained in a 

 small library of horse literature, and, in addition, a very large amount that 

 has never before been published. 



A most striking illustration of the necessity of a work of this character 

 is afforded by our recent exposure, in the " Middlebury Register", of the falsity 

 of the recorded pedigree of the dam of George Wilkes. This mare, upon 

 a very superficial investigation as early as 1878, was set down as bred by Clark 

 Phillips, Bristol, N. Y., and got by Henry Clay, and has so ever since stood 

 registered. Acting upon information and suggestions in a letter of Smith 

 Feek in the New York Sportsman, we last summer (1892) made a thorough 

 investigation of the subject, showing that the Phillips mare called the dam 

 was younger than George Wilkes and that his real dam was bought by 

 James Gilbert, now of Buffalo, N. Y., of an unknown man on the road in 

 Pennsylvania, and that her pedigree is unknown, probably hopelessly so. 



As another illustration: In "The Great Table" of the last Wallace 

 American Year Book, which undertakes to give all 2 : 30 trotters and 2 125 

 pacers, with pedigrees so far as known, arranged under their sires, and which 

 thus far has been generally accepted as authority, the horse Harris' Hamil- 

 tonian (called erroneously Hambletonian) appears through himself or sons 

 in nineteen pedigrees. Two of these are correct. All the other seventeen 

 are without warrant, and most of them certainly incorrect ; several are unknown. 

 We do not know that these are any better or any worse than the average of the 

 pedigrees, not sent in by breeders, recorded in these works, and it will 

 be readily seen how this last class would be affected by such a grotesque error as 



