40 THE NEXT GENERATION 



animals lived earlier, which later. He assures us that the 

 smallest horse bones are the oldest horse bones ever found. 



2. The paleontologist comes next. He puts fossil bones 

 together and tells us what kind of creature each animal was. 

 It is the paleontologist who describes horse bones in the 

 museum. He lets us see for ourselves that they are linked 

 together from generation to generation, and that they make 

 up an unbroken chain of ancestors and descendants. 



Other fossil bones tell tales of monster creatures that 

 lived and changed and vanished from the earth long before 

 man appeared. Each separate one yields its own separate 

 story, but no set of bones is easier to study, none gives quite 

 such a straight-ahead history, as the bones of the horse. 



These have been found in North and South America, in 

 Europe, Asia, and Africa. Of all these places, however, 

 Dr. Matthew says the best series comes from what is called 

 the Tertiary Bad Lands of the Western United States. 



As you bear these bones in mind, turn to the finest horse 

 you know and think of his pedigree. Also observe his present 

 size and shape, his powerful muscles, his long and slender 

 legs, his neck just long enough to carry his mouth to the 

 ground for grazing. Look at his strong, broad hoof (he 

 is the only single-hoofed animal in the world) and try to 

 realize that it was the ancestors of this horse that made him 

 what he is to-day. 



Many a man points proudly back to an ancestry more noble 

 than himself. The horse might point backwards, too, not to 

 show that once upon a time he had ancestors bigger, braver, 

 more glorious than he himself is now, but simply to show 

 that from small beginnings big results have come to make 

 it plain that, quite without conscious purpose, his early an- 

 cestors improved their opportunities, adjusted themselves to 



