A VERY OLD MASTER. 109 



retained (to be frankly evolutionary) many traces of the old monkey- 

 like progenitor, the horses which our old master has so cleverly deline- 

 ated for us on his scrap of horn similarly retained many traces of the 

 earlier united horse-and-donkey ancestor. Professor Huxley has ad- 

 mirably reconstructed for us the pedigree of the horse, beginning with 

 a little creature from the Eocene beds of New Mexico, with five toes 

 to each hind-foot, and ending with the modern horse, whose hoof is 

 now practically reduced to a single and solid-nailed toe. Intermediate 

 stages show us an Upper Eocene animal as big as a fox, with four toes 

 on his front feet and three behind ; a Miocene kind as big as a sheep, 

 with only three toes on the front-foot, the two outer of which are 

 smaller than the big middle one ; and, finally, a Pliocene form, as big 

 as a donkey, with one stout middle toe, the real hoof, flanked by two 

 smaller ones, too short by far to reach the ground. In our own horse 

 these lateral toes have become reduced to what are known by veter- 

 inaries as splint-bones, combined with the canon in a single solidly 

 mortised piece. But in the pre-Glacial horses the splint-bones still 

 generally remained quite distinct, thus pointing back to the still earlier 

 period when they existed as two separate and independent side-toes 

 in the ancestral quadruped. In a few cave specimens, however, the 

 splints are found united with the canons in a single piece, while con- 

 versely horses are sometimes, though very rarely, born at the present 

 day with three-toed feet exactly resembling those of their half-forgot- 

 ten ancestor, the Pliocene hipparion. 



The reason why we know so much about the horses of the cave 

 period is, I am bound to admit, simply and solely because the man of 

 the period ate them. Hippophagy has always been popular in France ; 

 it was practiced by pre-Glacial man in the caves of Perigord, and re- 

 vived with immense enthusiasm by the gourmets of the Boulevards 

 after the siege of Paris and the hunger of the Commune. The cave- 

 men hunted and killed the wild horse of their own times, and one of 

 the best of their remaining works of art represents a naked hunter 

 attacking two horses, while a huge snake winds itself unperceived be- 

 hind close to his heel. In this rough prehistoric sketch one seems to 

 catch some faint antique foreshadowing of the rude humor of the 

 " Petit Journal pour Rire." Some archaeologists even believe that the 

 horse was domesticated by the cave-men as a source of food, and argue 

 that the familiarity with its form shown in the drawings could only 

 have been acquired by people who knew the animal in its domesticated 

 state ; they declare that the cave-man was obviously horsey. But all 

 the indications seem to me to show that tame animals were quite un- 

 known in the age of the cave-men. The mammoth certainly was 

 never domesticated ; yet there is a famous sketch of the huge beast 

 upon a piece of his own ivory, discovered in the cave of La Madelaine 

 by Messrs. Lartet and Christy, and engraved a hundred times in works 

 on archaeology, which forms one of the finest existing relics of pre- 



