since 1857 the records of public coursing have been fairly well kept, though it is a fact that many of the smaller and less important meetings never find their way into the Calendar at all—a fact which can be easily understood when it is stated that the National Coursing Club do not require a return from each secretary of a meeting, after the manner of the Jockey Club and National Hunt Committee, which insist that every clerk of the course shall comply with their regulations in this respect. At the same time, it is only fair to state that the secretaries of all small coursing meetings are unpaid officials, while the Jockey Club officials are all licensed and paid for their services. The history of coursing has been presented in Goodlake, Thacker, in the Stud Book, and in the Coursing volume of the Badminton Library; and seeing that the last-mentioned work is of so recent a date, I shall not attempt to carry my readers over the well-worn ground, but shall divide my limited space between the two conditions under which the sport has long been pursued in this country.
Of these two, the simpler is coursing at home, for the pure love of the sport, where no monetary considerations can come into play. The other is the running of greyhounds in public, a form of sport which involves the preparation of the animals
