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IS GAINING IN POPULARITY Hunt Club Races Will Be Noteworthy Feature of Coming Autumn Turf Season. NEW YORK, X. Y., August 24. Hunt club meetings in the vicinity of Xcw York, Philadelphia and Baltimore will be unusually numerous this year, according to present prospects. The United Hunts Racing Association is to lead off on Thursday, September 1, with a series of races and steeplechases at Belmont Park Terminal. There will be a days sport later in the autumn under the auspices of the Meadow Brook Club on Long Island and another at the headquarters of the Fairfield and Westchester Hounds near Greenwich. Conn. In New Jersey the Wliippuny River Club has announced a hunt meeting on Saturday. November 5, while the Essex Fox Hounds Club will follow it up one week later with an important meeting at Far Hills. Pennsylvania, which has long been headquarters for fox hunting and hunt meetings, is to have a notable series of cross-country races, beginning on October S with the meeting of the Huntingdon Valley Hunt Club at Willow Grove, Pa. The meeting of the White Marsh Valley Hunt Club will follow on October 15 at Flourtown, Pa., and the ancient Rose Tree Fox Hunting Club will give two days of hunt racing at Media, Pa., on Wednesday, October 19, and Saturday, October 22. The meeting of the Pickering Hunt Club is scheduled for Thursday, November 12, while the Radnor Hunt Club will wina up the season with a meeting at Bryn Mawr oi. Thursday, November 24. Point to point racing is to be a prominent feature of these meetings, nearly all of which will be held on uniuclosed grounds and most of which boast or having no laid out courses or grandstands. All flat races will be run on the turf and not on a track. Point to point races, which are rapidly gaining in popularity, perhaps because they afford so good a test of a hunter, are virtually a revival of the original sport of steeplechasing. They are run from one conspicuous point to another, the riders being permitted to choose their own course across country in reaching them. At some meetings it Is customary to mark the jumps with flags, but this savors of the modern steeplechase, where the whole course is flagged to guide the riders. The early steeplechases, it is supposed, took their name from the custom among fox hunters of racing their horses to some distant church steeple, each rider, of course, taking a line of his own.
