KVOLTTTIOX OF Till': IIORSH. 1 25 



some paleotUolo.^ists that lujiiiis sivah')isis and /u]iius naniad- 

 iais became extinct, and that lujiius sicuonis ,i>ave rise through 

 one branch { Eqmis rolnistus) to our modern domestic horses 

 (Jujuiis ra(m//iis), and through another ( /iqjixs Horn's) to the 

 Burchell group of zebras { /{(//a/s burchcUi) . 



Though man probably lived in Western liurope before the 

 Ice Age, no trace of him has been found associated with the 

 remains of the Preglacial Wild Horse. Postglacial man came 

 in contact with him in PCurope, but they had become extinct 

 in North America before its supposed colonization by the ori- 

 ginal inhabitants of Asia, though in South America there are 

 indications that they persisted until man's advent. It is in 

 the Rough Stone i\ge that the remains of horse and man are 

 first found together, and, as they are here associated with 

 chipped stone implements, fire debris and pottery, we conclude 

 that the horse was at that time hunted and eaten by this cave- 

 dwelling man. The taming and breeding of horses did not 

 take place until thousands of years after man and horse first 

 came together. They were probably first domesticated in 

 Central Asia and North x\frica, but are not represented upon 

 Egyptian monuments earlier than the eighteenth dynasty. 

 The first Spanish explorers to the New World found no horses 

 and the Indians knew nothing of them either by contact or 

 tradition, yet when the horse was reintroduced to this country 

 by the white men in the sixteenth century, he thrived and 

 increased, showing how well he was adapted to the native 

 home of his ancestors. 



As man's companion in the harness of civilization we find 

 the modern horse almost perfect in his adaptation to his native 

 habitat, yet the rudiments of his conformity to a tropical 

 environment still linger, and it is not quite correct to say that 

 the lateral hoofs have absolutely disappeared. It is thought 

 by some that the chestnuts, or horn-like processes on the fore 

 and hind legs, are the remnants of the first digits ; others 

 regard them as the remains of cutaneous glands, which seems 

 less likely, but any doubt that in the horn-spurs of the fet- 



