ELEPHANTS, RHINOCEROSES, AND HORSES 277 



grew darker, and the chestnut or dun-coloured intervals fused 

 with them. Only on the limbs did the dun-coloured intervals 

 turn to blackish-brown, while the fused white markings darkened 

 to chestnut. In the tapir, which is a distant relation of the horse, 

 and the young of which are profusely spotted and striped with 

 white, we see something like the original coloration of the horse, 

 which is only represented to-day by the stripes of the zebra and 

 the dapplings of horses. The same white spots and stripes were 

 the characteristic of the primitive Artiodactyles, and are exhibited 

 to-day in the coloration of nearly all young pigs, in the perma- 

 nent markings of the tragulines,^ in the deer, the giraffe, the 

 okapi, and the tragelaphine antelopes. So that the parent forms 

 of the horse were originally marked with white spots and stripes ; 

 not black, as in the modern zebra. 



Equus caballus, or the True Horse, seems early in its de- 

 velopment to have exhibited two varieties, or sub-species. One 

 (represented by the modern Arabian horse) was characterised 

 by a small finely shaped head, a long mane, a smooth coat, and 

 a tail which was set on the body in such a way that the base 

 of the tail advanced a few inches in a horizontal direction before 

 making the downward sweep. This tail also was abundantly 

 plumed with hair, commencing at the very root. In this type of 

 horse the profile of the nose is either straight or slightly concave. 



The other and more northern type of horse is well represented 

 by the wild or semi-wild tarpan of Central Asia and the Russian 

 Steppes, a form which, though said to be feral — i.e., to have run 

 wild — is as likely as not to be the original wild horse of Europe. 

 This type, with the clumsy head and Roman nose, and (in the 

 original) a hog-like mane and a tail poorly furnished with plume 

 near the base, finds its highest expression in our modern cart- 

 horse. This was the horse that was hunted, eaten, tamed, and 

 ridden by primitive man in Europe and in Britain almost since 

 man appeared in this part of the world. 



It would seem as though the earliest domesticated of all 

 animals had been the dog, in the sense that various types of 

 ^ Primitive pig-like ruminants found in Africa and Asia. 



