390 THE HORSE 



and by the absence, with a few exceptions, of callosities on 

 the hind legs. Cossar Ewart has discovered another excep- 

 tion to this general rule in the absence of callosities on certain 

 of the ponies in the Western Islands of Scotland, to which 

 he has given the distinguishing name of " Celtic." 



Wild Horses. All horses met with in a wild state are 

 generally supposed, with one exception, to have broken away 

 from civilisation. The Tartar horse, for example, has been 

 clearly traced to Russian horses which were employed in 

 the siege of Azoph in 1657, but turned loose for want of 

 forage. This implies that " no horses, either wild or domesti- 

 cated, existed in any part of America at the time of the 

 Spanish Conquest, which is all the more astonishing, having 

 regard to the favourable conditions of soil and climate, as 

 demonstrated by the thousands of horses now ranging the 

 Pampas of South America, all descended from seven (Anda- 

 lusian) stallions and five mares introduced by the Spaniards" 

 OSSS)- 1 But an amount of evidence worthy of consideration 

 exists which some authorities argue goes a long way to estab- 

 lish the assumption that herds of wild horses roamed over the 

 plains of South America before latter-day communication had 

 begun between Europe and the New World. It appears that 

 on the map of Sebastian Cabot, " Pilota Mayor" of Charles V. 

 of Spain, which was executed prior to 1 546-47, the objects of 

 interest discovered by Cabot in 1 527 on the east coast of South 

 America are represented by drawings. In the upper reaches 

 of the river La Plata, which was first explored at the period 

 referred to, the horse is given with other animals which are 

 known to have existed in that region. It is therefore 

 possible that herds of native horses held possession of those 

 plains now included in the territory of the Argentine 

 Republic and of Paraguay, and that the last wild horses in 

 that region were their descendants crossed with imported 

 Spanish horses. It is regarded as improbable that in the 

 short space of twenty years which elapsed between the 

 discovery of Peru and the time of Cabot's explorations in 

 the La Plata, horses could have broken away in Peru and 

 penetrated the "vast forests of the Andes" so rapidly as to 



1 Ridgway, on the authority of Azara, Natural History of the Quadru- 

 peds of Paraguay and th* River La Plata (Eng. trans.), pp. 4~5> l8 - 



