io 4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



one another, with heads stretched forward, as if sniffing the air sus- 

 piciously in search of enemies. The horses would certainly excite un- 

 favorable comment at Newmarket. Their " points " are undoubtedly 

 coarse and clumsy : their heads are big, thick, stupid, and ungainly ; 

 their manes are bushy and ill-defined ; their legs are distinctly feeble 

 and spindle-shaped ; their tails more closely resemble the tail of the 

 domestic pig than that of the noble animal beloved with a love passing 

 the love of women by the English aristocracy. Nevertheless, there is 

 little (if any) reason to doubt that my very old master did, on the 

 whole, accurately represent the ancestral steed of his own exceedingly 

 remote period. There were once horses even as is the horse of the 

 prehistoric Dordonian artist. Such clumsy, big-headed brutes, dun in 

 hue and striped down the back like modern donkeys, did actually once 

 roam over the low plains where Paris now stands, and browse off lush 

 grass and tall water-plants around the quays of Bordeaux and Lyons. 

 Not only do the bones of the contemporary horses, dug up in caves, 

 prove this, but quite recently the Russian traveler Prjevalsky (whose 

 name is so much easier to spell than to pronounce) has discovered a 

 similar living horse, which drags on an obscure existence somewhere 

 in the high table-lands of Central Asia. Prjevalsky's horse (you see, 

 as I have only to write the word, without uttering it, I don't mind 

 how often or how intrepidly I use it) is so singularly like the clumsy 

 brutes that sat, or rather stood, for their portraits to my old master, 

 that we can't do better than begin by describing him in propria persona. 

 The horse family of the present day is divided, like most other 

 families, into two factions, which may be described for variety's sake 

 as those of the true horses and the donkeys, these latter including also 

 the zebras, quaggas, and various other unfamiliar creatures whose 

 names, in very choice Latin, are only known to the more diligent visi- 

 tors at the Sunday Zoo. Now everybody must have noticed that the 

 chief broad distinction between these two great groups consists in the 

 feathering of the tail. The domestic donkey, with his near congeners, 

 the zebra and co., have smooth, short-haired tails, ending in a single 

 bunch or fly-whisk of long hairs collected together in a tufted bundle at 

 the extreme tip. The horse, on the other hand, besides having horny 

 patches or callosities on both fore and hind legs, while the donkeys 

 have them on the fore-legs only, has a hairy tail, in which the long 

 hairs are almost equally distributed from top to bottom, thus giving it 

 its peculiarly bushy and brushy appearance. But Prjevalsky's horse, 

 as one would naturally expect from an early intermediate form, stands 

 half-way in this respect between the two groups, and acts the thank- 

 less part of a family mediator ; for it has most of its long tail-hairs 

 collected in a final flourish, like the donkey, but several of them spring 

 from the middle distance, as in the genuine Arab, though never from 

 the very top, thus showing an approach to the true horsey habit with- 

 out actually attaining that final pinnacle of equine glory. So far as one 



