Bibliothèque mondiale du cheval

« It is extremely difficult to compress so important and vast a subject as horses into a small space and still more difficult to condense it into readable form without lapsing into telegraphic curtness of style and dry statistics. Where my conclusions may diverge from the beaten track usually followed by writers echoing each other without verification especially in the matter of Thoroughbred history I must ask readers to take for granted that I make no assertion and contradict no previously accepted theories without the fullest investigation. Where I have hesitated to accept as proved some scientific theories or historical assumptions which by constant repetition are becoming rooted in the public mind and have challenged the soundness of the premises on which they rest-when these appear to me improbable, impossible, or in any way open to doubt— I have set out the reasons for this hesitation and collected the facts for consideration in my book Thoroughbred Racing Stock and its Ancestry, and in its companion volume The Authentic Arabian Horse and his Descendants, where full details, previously unknown and unpublished and for which there is no room here, will be found. In reviewing British breeds we come to the final satisfactory conclusion that, whatever the system on which British breeders work, British horse and pony stock of all kinds taken as a whole is the best in the world. […] » Présentation de l’éditeur (1944)