MAN FROM THE FARTHEST PAST 
as sacrificial victim, among nearly all the original horse- 
using peoples of antiquity, as well as among many of more 
modern times. 
The feeling of repugnance to eating horse-meat that 
many people feel arose in a very curious way out of such 
early associations. So far as its natural qualities go, horse- 
meat is little if at all inferior to beef, and various races 
have habitually eaten it. It formed the principal food of 
some of the peoples of the Old Stone Age, and the later 
Huns, Mongols, and Tartars also ate it. Before Europe’s 
conversion to Christianity, horse-meat was much eaten 
at religious festivals held in honor of the old pagan gods. 
Because of these associations with heathenism the early 
Christian missionaries forbade its use, as ““meat offered to 
idols.”” Hence people gradually came to feel that there 
must be something repulsive in horse-meat itself, and many 
still have this feeling without in the least knowing why. 
With all our machinery we moderns are in danger of 
underestimating the importance of domestic animals in 
earlier days. We think of them today mainly as sources 
of food, leather, and wool; and in large measure certain 
forms, such as the pig, the sheep, and the goat, have 
always been so. But others, especially the ox, the horse, 
and the camel, became chiefly important to man as ani- 
mated machines, capable of doing his work for him far 
more effectively than he himself could do it unassisted. 
Man’s treatment of animals finds several rather inter- 
esting parallels in his treatment of man, whom perhaps It is 
not altogether incorrect to call also a domestic animal. 
All but the more backward races have passed through the 
institution of slavery. Before its development prisoners 
of war were killed, often with frightful tortures. Then it 
occurred to the more advanced peoples that they might 
do better to spare some and make them do the hard and 
disagreeable work. Thus slavery in its origin marked a 
great step in advance in the direction of humanity and 
belongs probably to the New Stone Age. 
[ 254] 
