The History and Romance of the Horse

By Arthur Vernon and Ernest John Donnelly

This sweeping panorama of horse-related history and lore will captivate readers of all ages. Starting with the miniature Eohippus, the narrative traces the evolution of the horse from prehistory through its roles and representations in Greek mythology, the Middle Ages, early America and the Wild West, and beyond. Profiles include race horses, working and war horses, and a variety of breeds and strains.
Each of the chapters may be read individually as well as consecutively. Numerous charming black-and-white illustrations accompany these true tales of Egyptian pharaohs, medieval knights, cowboys and Indians, and other historic figures and their equine companions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Release date: Dec 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9780486782997

Book preview

HORSE

BOOK ONE

FORTY-FIVE MILLION YEARS

The horse is an animal, which, from the earliest ages of the world, has been destined to the pleasure and service of man.

—Berenger, Gentleman of the Horse to George III.

I

THE DAWN HORSES

FOR thousands of years the history of the horse and the history of man have been one, in war and peace, in exploration and adventure, in work and play. It has been a firm and a fascinating partnership.

Thus, all the romance of man’s adventure on this earth, all the pageantries of war, the triumphs of peace, the terrific toil and turmoil of man’s few thousand years of related history is shared by the horse.

But, millions of years before the history of man begins, the history of the horse can be recorded.

The first horse took his look about the world just about the time the earth was splitting and roaring with the upheaval that formed the Rocky Mountains. And, interestingly enough, the first horse lived along the eastern slopes of the Rockies. That was about forty-five million years ago—millions of years before the advent of man.

Do not think of the first horse, however, as an animal of noble dimensions standing with a triumphant air upon the mountainsides, or galloping possessively over rich pasture-lands. The first horse—Eohippus, the Dawn Horse—was about the size of a large tomcat. However, some of his cousins were somewhat larger, the greatest attaining the considerable height of twenty inches. This is probably equal to that of a present day terrier, but it was certainly nothing to brag about in a world which had just got rid of dinosaurs that would make Indian elephants look like kittens. In brief, if the Dawn Horses depended upon their size to win the struggle for existence, they would have been beaten before they started.

If terriers and Dawn Horses were contemporaries, this is how they would have looked together.

Aside from this lilliputian size, the physical appearance of the Dawn Horses was not otherwise so awesome as to daunt potential enemies. They had roundish little bodies, short necks, ineffective and small teeth and, far from a ferocious countenance, wore an expression akin to benevolent vacuity. They were as harmless, as totally inoffensive and mild looking creatures as ever appeared on the face of the earth. And if some eternal umpire in the contest of life looked down upon the species, his prompt opinion would unquestionably have been that they had about as much chance for survival in the relentless arena of prehistoric life as a mouse in a pen of half-starved wildcats. Their equipment for the ordeal of surviving was pitifully limited.

Limited as it was, nevertheless, it was not altogether lacking. Eohippus, the Dawn Horse, found himself gifted with a set of extraordinarily effective legs. He could scamper through the forests and among the plants with a swiftness probably never before seen on the earth. His legs were slender and tapering, and his feet were peculiarly useful in traveling over a varied terrain. He had no hoofs, in those ancient days, probably because he had no use for them and they would have been less a help than a hindrance. He did have four toes on each of his front feet and three on the back. And the toes were useful. They had pads on the bottom, very much like the pads on the feet of a dog, and nails formed an armor for them.

The value of this nether equipment to an animal of such conservative dimensions and such bland general appearance can be readily seen. With the slim, graceful legs, he could outrun his enemies. With the soft pads on his feet, he could tread about as he wished without giving himself away with tramping noises. With the flexible toes, he could secure a grip on the less even grounds of his region. And with the nails (which were, in fact, embryo hoofs) he could cling more firmly to rough spots on the slanting slopes. From the dawn of his days, then, the horse has depended chiefly on his legs for his existence. And his legs are also what has made him what he is in this ludicrously young Age of Man.

How the Dawn Horses lived is a matter purely for speculation. No one knows. But we can find clues of a sort. Let us consider various of his physical attributes in relation to the type of world which, we are reasonably sure, then existed. Thus, we can attempt to solve the mystery of how so diminutive and frail an animal managed to live through millions of years down to the present.

Eohippus, The Dawn Horse.

In the first place, it should be remembered that, small and insignificant as he was, the Dawn Horse had the jump on the rest of the mammals in one respect, at least. And that was in time. Although he was never the only mammal to grace the earth (rodents, for example, have been around as long as horses have), neither was he behind the times when, those forty-five millions of years ago, the characteristic life on this planet had passed from reptiles to the first mammals. Accordingly, before the animal kingdom became an arena for fierce fights to weed out the weakest, the Dawn Horse was quite well adjusted to the earth, aware of its goodness and experienced in its enmity. In less imposing terms, the Dawn Horse simply knew its way around. And that is a considerable advantage in any contest.

In the second place, the North American continent was then geographically and climatically much more friendly to the development of those little creatures than it would prove today. Moreover, the continent harbored no mammalian opposition so overpowering that the Dawn Horse would have not the least show against it. These are important considerations, for, given the whimsical climate and rough natural conditions of this continent today, with a couple of aggressive wolves thrown in, the Dawn Horse would have perished as quickly as he appeared. But in those remote days, America was warm, chiefly constituted of semi-tropical woodlands and dotted with occasional lagoons, about which flourished rich vegetation. Besides providing food for the Dawn Horse, these thick bushes and heavy plants also furnished a serviceable place to hide in, for it was the discreet policy, promoted by a very sound instinct, of those primitive horses to go out of their way to avoid a fight rather than, as in the case of less retiring mammals, to go out and look for one.

This pacifist proclivity undoubtedly is also the product of the horse’s taste in foods. An animal whose system requires the eating of large daily doses of meat is inevitably going to kill to get it. But an animal who is satisfied with a plant diet and has, therefore, no desperate need for fighting, will naturally avoid it. So the Dawn Horse, delicately built and refined as he was, depended not on any physical might for his survival but relied entirely on his grace and speed in moving to make a place for himself in the world. Since this was before the age of the great American grasslands, he was primarily a creature of the forests. In his naturally and advisedly quiet and unobtrusive way, he went about the business of living gracefully and alertly, using his multi-toed feet to get around and his long jaws to reach for his food.

He held his own in the prehistoric world. But that advantage in time which he had did not result in any immediate enlargement of his body. There is no principle in evolution or natural history that warrants the slightest hypothesis that duration of life in a species has anything to do with its size. If there were, the horse might well be forty-eight feet tall, if one considers the length of his stay on the earth with the length of man’s. Instead, the horse remained small, for his environment was much more favorable to a horse of small size than it would have been to one of giant dimensions. Except for the variation in sizes of the several more or less contemporary species of the Dawn Horse genus, which was not more than a foot in any instance, the ancient horse remained a tiny, plant-eating, running and leaping creature.

If length of residence on earth had anything to do with height, horse and man would look like this.

Such was the Dawn Horse’s lot in the prehistoric world—a simple enough beginning but still a place under the pristine sun. He had found himself. He knew what to eat and enough to avoid his enemies. He used his head a little and his legs a great deal. And he brought his genus to the starting line of modern mammals and into the present age of man. The continents of the world saw successive invasions of repeated glaciers, altering the face of the earth and leaving plains of strange grasses, rivers where they never flowed before and deep canyons where there had been primitive swamplands. But the line of the Dawn Horse continued, as we shall see, to roam the earth and to flourish in it.

Eohippus, the Dawn Horse, it is interesting to note, derived his name not alone from the fact that he was the first of his genus, the founder of a long dynasty, but also from the circumstance that he made his appearance in the Eocene period. That is, the Dawn Horse was one of the first animals to portend the dawn of a new era. It was the dawn both of rule by a new order and of survival under new principles. The new order was the mammalian, in the procession of which the horse marched inconspicuously in the van. And the guiding new principle was/that brains can conquer brawn. !

The importance of this gradual change in the state of the prehistoric world cannot be too much stressed in a consideration of the survival of the Dawn Horse. Despite his speed in moving, his ability to hide and move silently and his tendency to avoid unnecessary contact with less placid creatures, the Dawn Horse would very likely still have been snuffed out, were it not for this whole new scheme of things gradually but persistently turning out the old. For the horse, completely unconscious of his times and caring no more about what went before than what lay ahead, was no less the symbol of the beginning of a new era.

From the standpoint of natural history, the general scene into which the timid and wary little animal was ushered must have been like a sunny morning after a nightmarish storm. The long and cruel Age of the Reptiles, covering over a hundred million years, was over. Domination by the dinosaurs, who stalked and rampaged over every quarter of the globe, was ended.

So profound were the changes in the earth itself and so complete was the extinction of the dinosaurs that it is doubtful that any visible vestige of their heyday remained in the following period to haunt the life of the Dawn Horse. But the first horse owed something to those incomparable monsters, if it was only for the thoroughness with which they managed to send themselves and their fellows to doom. Certainly in their world—if the world had continued to be theirs—the horse would have been obliterated like an ant under a man’s heel.

The largest of the first horses could not have weighed more than a hundred pounds. But the dinosaurs who preceded them on this planet weighed over four thousand pounds, some of them approaching three tons. The largest horse was twenty inches in height. The average dinosaur was ninety feet in length; and, balancing his body with his huge, heavy tail, he could, stand on his long hind legs to attain a height of fifty towering feet. Even in speed, crowning virtue of the equine race, the horse had no advantage over the dinosaurs. The latter, particularly those carnivorous brutes who preyed upon scores of lesser creatures to nourish their tonnage, sped over miles with a lightning-like pace, seizing their victims with talon claws and mangling them wholesale in their powerful jaws. It is a wonder of evolution, though no mystery, that such an animal, so picayune in comparison, as the horse should ever succeed to a world previously controlled by the most gigantic, the fastest, the most powerful and the most ravenous living thing that ever terrorized the earth.

Dinosaurs preceded horses in the march of earthly life. Here is how they would compare had horses come a few million years earlier.

Yet if the dinosaur was the ugliest mechanism ever to have been gifted with voluntary locomotion, the world over which it ruled, and which was the geologic eve of the birth of the horse, made up a suitably ugly environment. The world was designed as though expressly for these monsters, with one eye on ugliness and the other on destruction. Reptiles comparable to the dinosaurs on the land dominated the air and the sea. Giant winged reptiles, flying with great bony wings, swooped down to destroy land creatures and plants. Huge sea lizards sloshed through the oceans to seize their prey. The carnivorous dinosaurs, meanwhile, destroyed not only other orders but were bent on ravishing their cousins, the pinheaded and streamlined versions of bloated and be-pawed snakes.

In contrast to the succeeding grace of the Dawn Horses, motion itself was ugly. The air reptiles were too hugely and awkwardly constructed to embark on any graceful flights. Simply flopping into space from a cliff whence they sighted their prey, they gathered momentum as they fell and used their wings only to hold themselves up. Although a little more fleet in their motions, the sea lizards snorted their way through the waters of the earth, leaping up out of the deep to snatch and gulp whatever hove in sight. It was on land, however, that the epitome of ugliness was reached on this hideous eve of the appearance of the horse. The dinosaurs were in absolute power. Slimy, swift but gross, what they did not intentionally destroy to appease their appetites or vent their spleen they accidentally snuffed out by trampling and mauling. They ruled the earth by sheer viciousness and brute size.

One might still wonder that the earth should pass from the extreme characterized by the dinosaur to the extreme characterized by such mammalian weakness as the horse. It seems incredible that these enormous reptiles could ever lose their prestige to such a little cluster of pitifully weak emerging mammals. The most feasible theory as to why they did is simply that they had no brains worth mentioning. For, although a dinosaur weighed two and a half tons, its brain usually weighed something less than a pound, which means a unit of gray matter equal to one five-thousandth (1/5000) of its body. In other words, the dinosaurs and allied reptiles of the period immediately preceding the Eocene, Dawn of Recent Times and birthday of the Dawn Horse, kept going as long as they did simply from physiochemical interactions. Physical perfection of a mechanical sort compensated for lack of intelligence. But it was insufficient compensation. When their environment changed and their interactions slowed down, they were too stupid to know what to do and too lazy to do it if they had known. So they died out, just as did their fellows of the air and the seas.

If the dinosaurs had not rid the world of themselves, their frequent gigantic battles might have meant the end of the race of horses.

With the new period came a new era. Brains succeeded brawn. Grace followed brutality.

II

WHERE THEY WENT

THE Dawn Horses did not become localized to the western part of the North American continent. Nomadic by nature, some of them wandered up through Alaska into Asia, for the Behring Strait did not exist in those days and the two continents were connected. From the northeast corner of Asia, the horses then migrated southwest until they reached Europe, where they concentrated in great numbers about the fertile shores of the lake which then occupied the site of Paris.

Early in the nineteenth century, geologists exploring the rock strata of France, Switzerland and Belgium found a profusion of ancient horse bones there. Because the restored skeletons had a remarkable resemblance to Eohippus and because the bones were found in a rock strata nearly as old as that in which the Dawn Horses were entombed, it must be inferred that this migration took place very early in the history of the horse.

These migrants to Europe take over the stage of the historical drama of the horse from the day that they arrived there. Probably because living conditions in prehistoric Europe were so favorable, there was a mushroom spreading of horses while back in America the Dawn Horses were progressing very slowly and evenly. Eventually, as will be seen, the progress of the horses in Europe proved to be false progress; but the rapidity and certainty with which they literally infested the continent commanded attention for several million years from the progeny of the Dawn Horses in America.

The first European horse—the one whose remains were found in the London clay—was named Hyracotherium, which means a shrew-like beast. He was closely related to the Dawn Horse, and looked very much like the latter. In the same Eocene period of his birth, during which entire period of millions of years the American Dawn Horse’s issue remained unchanged, Hyracotherium had a descendant who progressed to the considerable extent of having teeth less primitive than his own. This descendant’s remains have been found about eighty miles south of Paris, a region in which prehistoric horses settled in exceptional numbers due to the richness of the vegetation. His name, as can be seen on the chart illustrating the family tree of the horse, was Propachynolophus. He was not much bigger than the Dawn Horse, the only slight difference being in the structure of his teeth. Nor was his own grandson, who bore the same name a few million years later, much different. These horses still had the toes of the original Dawn Horse, were still slight in build and had a tendency to use the middle toe more than the others. They probably lived a running life around the Marne country so much like the life of their forebears that they did not change much.

Pretty soon, however, a version of the horse appeared in Europe that began to show a progressive change in physique. They were descendants of the same Hyracotherium who went to Europe, but they lived around the lake that is now the city of Paris. The lake was gradually drying up, leaving a tasty swampland in which to live and which provided a nourishing diet throughout the forests surrounding it. Living where he did, the horse had less need of running swiftly over open country and consequently had less long and slender legs. He also developed a thicker body, grew larger than his ancestors and did not bother to stand on his middle toe. His name was Propalaeotherium, meaning before the ancient beast, and he would compare favorably in size with an Irish setter, which is some growth over the terrier-sized Dawn Horse.

Family Tree of the Horse

Propalaeotherium had four main descending branches. The first was Lophiotherium, which means vaguely the crest-beast, but he died out and wasn’t much different from his predecessors. He had a cousin, Ancilophus, who came along somewhat later, with the name meaning near-crest, and who also died without distinguishing himself. There were then only two types of descendants from the first European horse.

One of these was Paloplotherium. This branch pushed the business of evolution right along at a rapid pace, coming nearer to modern wild horses than any other prehistoric type. His middle toe was so enlarged as to be almost a hoof, though he still had the other two on his back feet. On his front feet, besides the middle one, there were also only two. You will remember that the Dawn Horse and his immediate successors all had four-toed front feet. So this ancient horse of Europe was first to lose one of his extra toes. He was also quite large, his shoulders probably reaching the top of your dining room table. Moreover, he and his breed roamed around in herds, which was an outstanding characteristic of the much later wild horses of the United States and of Asia and also of the African zebras (see Book Three). Teeth changes show that this horse also gave up entirely the habit of eating from bushes and shrubs and plants of the forest. Instead, he ate grasses. Despite all this progress, however, his line died out for some unknown reason, which might be that he was chased out of existence by larger animals.

Origin of the Hoof

A.The dawn horse’s forefoot, with four toes.

B.After twenty million years, he lost his smallest toe and enlarged his middle one.

C.In another twenty million years, he had lost the other two and the nail of the remaining one had formed a hoof.

Palaeotherium, a breed from the same sires as the most horselike of prehistoric horses, lived at the same time, in approximately the same place and was very possibly the very animal that chased them out and into extinction. These ancient beasts (which is all that their name means) flourished so exceedingly that pretty soon there was an Age of Horses in Europe, horses ruling the continent. Some of them were developing flat, broad feet, in order that they might better rule the swamplands. Others were sporting indecently large feet. Still others—probably the group that ruled the whole roost and spurred the others on—ate so much that they became as large as rhinoceroses.

Europe was a huge city of horses in those days of thirty-five million years ago and ten million years after the Dawn Horses first appeared. It was as much a gigantic city of horses as New York, in this little interglacial period, is a city of human beings. There were short horses and tall horses, fat horses and thin horses, bold horses and timid horses. Horses lived in fields and in forests, on hillocks and in swamps. It was a horse world, as far as the continent of Europe was concerned.

Then came the pin that pricked the bubble of this horse inflation, through slow years all these varied and multitudinous horses died out. Why they did is one of the mysteries of evolution, and no one yet knows the answer. It may have been tropical changes in the land that deprived them of food. It may have been that the increasing number of larger mammals destroyed them. Whatever the cause, they died out before achieving the first evolutionary triumph of horsedom: acquiring a hoof.

*  *  *  *  *

That was the end of the line of Hyracotherium, the primitive horse found in the London Clay, he who journeyed from the North American birthplace of the Dawn Horses to start the European branch. Thus, there were no horses in Europe until, over thirty million years later, the horses of America again migrated there. So, for thirty million years, you can forget all about Europe in connection with horses. There were none on that continent.

But there were still horses in North America. The true line of Eohippus, the original Dawn Horse, was prospering at a slow and even rate. Again referring to the chart of the horse’s family tree, you will note that its progress was at a much more conservative pace than that of the European branch. You will notice also that it persisted much longer, in fact right up until the present.

The first distinct American descendant of the Dawn Horses was Orohippus, meaning the mountain horse and derived from his habitat in the eastern Rockies. Orohippus was just as small as his ancestor, for mountain creatures never grow large quickly since there is no purpose in their being larger. And he still had his four toes in front and three toes aft. The only difference in his structure, in effect, was the fact that he had teeth which seem to indicate that he was beginning to feed on more grasslike plants than the Dawn Horses were wont to. Otherwise, he was just a second edition of Eohippus.

By the time that great horse movement was thoroughly launched in prehistoric Europe, when all sorts of horses were rife over the land, the second distinct type of Dawn Horse descendant emerged in America. He was called Epihippus, and his progress was surprisingly slow as compared to the last of the European horses which were contemporary to him. He, too, was exactly like the original Dawn Horse, save for his teeth (which were even more suited to grass chewing than the mountain horse’s) and his feet, on which the middle toe was appreciably enlarged.

After him and after there were no more horses in Europe, Mesohippus appeared on the American scene. This, translated, is the middle horse, who was about the size of a sheep. Although he was somewhat advanced in having lost one of the four toes on his front feet, he is chiefly important as the predecessor of Miohippus, the lesser horse. The reason why this latter animal is worth particular mention is that from his line sprang more than one branch, whereas—as the chart shows—all previous development of the American horse was from one single type to another.

Mesohippus, the middle horse, was about as big as a sheep and sported three toes.

Not so the seed of Miohippus. He was the forerunner of no less than four variations of himself. Three of these were side lines, and not important to the development of the main line of the horse because they wandered away somewhere and died out. But the fourth was, and his name was Parahippus, which is to say that he was a horse alongside of or beyond those other three. There were more than one type of Parahippus, for some progressed in one way and some in another, according to their environment. For example, those who got out from the forests onto more open ground developed that middle toe until it almost amounted to a small hoof, though there were still the two additional toes on the feet. And those who, without getting out of the forests, yet restricted their diet more and more to grasses underwent subtle changes in their dentition.

Then came Merychippus, a cud-chewing horse. Merychippus, for the second time in the lineage of the American horse, started more than one succeeding distinct type. But three of these disappeared and only Pliohippus, the greater horse, carried on the main line. Pliohippus flourished around 7,000,000 B.C., which was when the highest form of man was an anthropoid ape. But, while the future race of man was no way near to fulfilling his potentialities, with Pliohippus, the equine race had at last, thirty-eight million years after that first shy and tiny Dawn Horse, reached its present form in size, features and the distinguishing acquisition of the hoof.

Another variety of Mesohippus, flourishing in America after the European horses died out.

The direct descendant of Pliohippus, Equus was the horse in pristine times as we know it now. He belongs to two periods, however, the Pleistocene (New Period) and the present recent times which have been going on for the past twenty-five thousand years. And he had the most adventurous life of all the types of the various stages in the long history of the horse.

*  *  *  *  *

The primary reason why Equus was so adventurous and radiated to all corners of the earth was that he had to keep on the move because of the glaciers. These glaciers are also the probably ultimate reason why, though America was the continent on which the Dawn Horse’s line survived, it was Europe and Asia that had horses when they were first used by man and when there were no horses at all in the Western hemisphere.

What happened to the North American continent, very recently as far as the world’s history goes and during the period Equus flourished, was briefly this: About forty-three million years after the Dawn Horses appeared on the face of the earth (which would make it only two million years ago), some conditions—external to the earth itself—caused the earth to suffer a chill. Ordinarily, the earth had been a pretty warm planet, largely semi-tropical. But then something happened to its relationship to the sun. Either the sun itself underwent transitory changes, affecting the earth in temperature, or else something went awry in the space between this planet and the sun. Anyhow, instead of staying up at the North Pole, the ice sheet capping the globe extended further and further down the continent until its southernmost edge extended in a jagged line from New Jersey to Saint Louis and then northwesterly to the state of Washington. Five of these ice sheets, at intervals of several thousand years, pushed their way down over the continent, each retreating during the glacial intervals when the world was gradually warmed again. We are living in one of these glacial intervals at the present moment, for it is only twenty-five thousand years since that last ice sheet came down. We need not worry about the return of the ice sheet (now lurking about Greenland), however; for the usual intervals were much more than our petty twenty-five thousand years, and the earth invariably grew much warmer in the intervals than it has yet become in the present inter-glacial breathing spell.

This is Hypohippus, a forest horse which lived and died out in America millions of years before the emergence of man.

Now what happened to the horses of this continent—then the only horses on the face of the earth—when these ice sheets spread over half the land and chilled the rest?

First, some of them went to Europe, thus renewing the strain of horses there with this second migration. This was just before the Ice Age, for the actual climate of North America underwent unfavorable changes as a sort of prelude to the advancing of the ice itself. Or, what is the same thing, the conditions, whatever they were, that gave rise to the Ice Age, also caused preliminary modifications in the North American climate. When these first cold spells descended upon the continent and destroyed much of the horses’ food, a good many of the latter instinctively migrated across Asia not only to Europe but also to Africa. These are the horses who founded the zebra race in Africa, where they changed somewhat to adapt themselves to the new environment and acquired stripes to blend with the African landscape (see Book Three), and who also started the line of Asiatic wild horses (see also Book Three). Those who settled in Europe and Asia Minor were the immediate ancestors of the horses later adopted by the race of man, which was even then emerging. Those horses, who made themselves scarce in America before the actual Ice Age began, were fortunate.

The remaining ones were not. Some of them very sensibly migrated to South America, where even after the successive glaciers there was still much to eat. Nevertheless, for some mysterious reason, all these horses died out about a half a million years ago. The probability is that they died from a disease that was not alone restricted to horses. During the same period, North America was fairly well populated with camels, who lived in the same places as the horses in the western part of the United States. These, too, departed for South America, and met near extinction, except in the shape of llamas. And in North America other mammals, far different from the horse, such as tigers and elephants, who were common here just before the Ice Age, also died off. Finally, those horses who had not bothered to migrate to the southern hemisphere at all, but who just stayed here in North America, died for want of food.

Equus, whose line was forced to migrate from America to survive the glaciers, was the direct ancestor of all present horses,

Because the Ice Age was more or less the fateful age for the horses, it must not be assumed that the huge sheet of ice came down from the north so quickly that neither horses nor anything else knew what was happening and were killed by actual physical contact with the boulder-pushing glacier. It took thousands of years for each glacier. And, as has been pointed out, the effects of the on-coming sheets were felt long before the ice itself was dangerously near. Hence, these horses who remained on the continent, died before the actual arrival of a glacier rather than with its arrival or afterwards. The warning cold that chilled the path of the descending ice sheet simply made the continent unfit for habitation by the horses. Accordingly, those staying in the face of conditions growing steadily worse slowly died out.

These pre-glacial conditions on this continent and the mysterious disease that killed the horses that had migrated to South America left the western hemisphere as horseless as a Ford factory. The story of the horse in his relation to the history of the human race, therefore, begins in that little corner of the ancient world that hovered about the Mediterranean Sea.

BOOK TWO

THE HORSE COMES OF AGE

Consider then that spirit and ardour are in the temper of an horse, what passion is in the mind of man.

—Xenophon, Treatise on Horsemanship.

I

ADOPTION BY MAN

AN indictment frequently brought against this latter day human race is that it is speed crazy. Professional viewers-with-alarm even go so far as to say that the love of speed will eventually bring about man’s doom. The more amateur observers, however, are willing to submit only the opinion that the present is the worst possible of centuries simply because everyone wants to go somewhere in a hurry, get things done in a hurry and live generally in a hurry.

An acquaintance with the very beginning of man’s association with the horse, on the other hand, shows that, far from being a somewhat disgraceful characteristic of the present era, speed has been man’s mania from the beginning and that, had he not been a speed-loving mammal, man would very likely have not bothered with the horse at all. There are much more efficient beasts of burden than the horse, so that it is not likely that man adopted the horse simply to help him carry things. What he did adopt it for was to help him hurry things up apace.

You do not have to depend upon conjecture to arrive at a decision as to what first attracted the human race to the equinerace. You can find out simply by considering briefly the horse’s very name. Just as the rocks of the planet are the best possible guide to a study of prehistoric animals, the best possible guide to man’s very early notice of them is the words lie used to identify them. Words were just sounds in ancient days, but they were sounds that mimicked or otherwise suggested with vividness the outstanding quality of the thing about which primitive man was trying to convey information. If an animal customarily made a noise that impressed the primitive man more than any other aspect of it, he simply imitated the noise when he wanted to announce his message that such a thing was around. Or if he wanted to talk about the wind, he merely made a noise like the one which the wind makes. If this went on forever, of course, there would not be enough noises to go around. Besides, he might want to talk about something which made no noise at all.

But man was resourceful in his infancy, and bright. So he made up sounds to represent such things as motion, smells and sights. He was a pure poet in the sense that he used sounds that carried with them a likeness to the thing represented. Then he used these words as the basis for his whole vocabulary. If he discovered an animal or thing that seemed to be going about from place to place all the time and never getting anywhere, he called it the going one or the walking one. For example, the Greeks called the sheep probata, which meant things walking forward. And in ancient Sanskrit, the word for river was sarit, which is just a variation of the word sar, meaning to go, for a river seemed to them to be something that was going all the