INTRODUCTION. 



XI 



white or dun colour, which originally had its home in Upper 

 Europe and Upper Asia. 



Some years ago I came to the conclusion that the domestic 

 horses of Europe, North Africa and the greater part of Asia had 

 mainly been derived from three wild species or varieties, which 

 in a recent paper I have named the Steppe, Forest, and Plateau 

 varieties. This conclusion, based on a study of the skeleton as 

 well as of the external characters and habits of modern horses. 



i^noid by\ l^T. A. i'.WAKT. 



Fig. 3. — Two year-old Prjevalsky horse in winter coat. Note the 

 coarse ram-like head and the wide space between the eye and the 

 nostril, as in many cart horses. 



(From Hayes' " Points of the Horse.") 



has been confirmed by the examination of a number of skeletons 

 of horses in the possession of the Romans or their auxiliaries who 

 garrisoned the Newstead Fort, near Melrose, during the first and 

 second centuries, A.D. 



The Steppe variety, of which Prjevalsky's horse is a wild repre- 

 sentative, includes forms in which the face is long and strongly 

 bent on the cranium, as in the preslac'al American horse E. scntti, 

 and as in sheep and oxen and other forms specially adapted for 

 cropping short herbage. 



