ORIGIN OF DOMESTICATED ANIMALS 215 



horse, while able to maintain himself against wolves in Asia, is 

 not able to withstand the puma, which has exterminated the feral 

 horses in certain localities of South America. 



All this, however, is but ancient history, and now we can only 

 speculate upon what would have been our misfortune and our 

 condition had the prehistoric horselike animal become extinct 

 in Asia, as he did in the rest of the world, and we had been 

 obliged to get on without the horse. 1 



Since his domestication the horse has doubtless changed but 

 little. He is larger, stronger, and swifter, but structurally he 

 seems to have been for a long time a finished animal. Under 

 domestication he has developed the trot, until with some breeds 

 it is an instinctive gait. This is a great tribute to breeding, for 

 the trot is not a natural gait with animals of the horse kind, 

 except for a few steps between the canter and the walk. 



However early the domestication of the horse, — and it must 

 have been very early, — its introduction into modern historic life 

 is comparatively recent. For example, the Egyptian carvings 

 and frescoes show nothing of the horse until after the close of 

 the rule of the shepherd kings (1800 or 1900 B.C.), when that 

 country first came into contact with Assyria. In Xerxes' army 

 even the Arabs were mounted upon camels. The Hebrews had 

 no horses until about the time of Solomon and after their ac- 

 quaintance with the Syrians. The earliest human records of the 

 horse are the Assyrian sculptures, where, curiously enough, the 

 horseman is accompanied by an attendant who leads the horse, 

 an attention which would be greatly scorned by his Cossack 

 representative of to-day, as it would by any rider not the merest 

 novice, showing that we have improved somewhat in horseman- 

 ship since the old Assyrian days. 



The ass (Equus hemionus and Equusasinus). In eastern countries 

 the ass has long been a favorite beast of burden, antedating the 

 horse by many centuries. In our own country this animal has 



1 It. will add to our appreciation of the horse if students will choose this 

 topic for an occasional composition. 



