626 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



presence in southern Italy sufficed to cause his scepter to fall from 

 his impotent grasp. 



In the concluding chapters of his Philosophical Catechism our 

 author ridicules love of country as a shallow sentiment, censures 

 patriotism as sedition, burns holy incense under the noses of the 

 score of petty potentates who were then the curse of Italy, praises 

 foreign domination, extols the " loyal and Christian " house of 

 Hapsburg, and even invokes the blessing of heaven upon the 

 Austrian soldiers, and has the impudence to assert that there is 

 not a foot of soil in the whole peninsula that has not been freed 

 and saved by them. 



The rapid march of events since 1860 has now made it seem 

 almost incredible that such a work, worthy of the darkest period 

 of the middle ages, should have been written, approved by the 

 Church and the state, and circulated as a public document in 

 southern Italy less than fifty years ago. 



It is at present almost impossible to obtain a copy of the origi- 

 nal volume ; but the people of the Two Sicilies had no sooner 

 achieved their independence than the liberal party at Naples re- 

 printed it as a monument to the deposed Bourbon dynasty — a 

 monument that performs the functions of a pillory. 



-♦♦♦- 



WILD HORSES. 



By Dr. EDOUARD L. TROUESSAET. 



THE primitive stock of the domestic horse has until recently 

 been considered wholly extinct. A few more or less numer- 

 ous herds of horses called tarpans are living in a state of free- 

 dom in the steppes of central Asia, but they are the descendants 

 of domestic horses that have become wild, and do not differ much 

 more from the domestic races of the same country than the half- 

 wild horses of the Landes and of La Camargue, in the south of 

 France, differ from the horse of Tarbes or the Pyrenees. 



There are also found in the Asiatic steppes bands of really 

 wild animals, the hemiones, onagras, or fertile mules of the 

 ancients, which are not true horses, but, notwithstanding their 

 shorter ears, more resemble the ass and mule. They are widely 

 scattered in Asia and form three distinct species, of which the 

 best known is the Indian hemione (Equus hemionus, var. ona- 

 ger), the onagra of Pallas and the ancients, the glior kliur of the 

 Hindoos, the gliour or kherdecht of the Persians, and the koulan 

 of the Kirghiz — a species common in zoological gardens, where it 

 is easily bred. 



It inhabits the Cutch or Indian Desert and the steppes of Tur- 



