256 A BOOK-LOVER S HOLIDAYS 



was not a beast for peaceful uses; he was the 

 war-horse, whose neck was clothed with thun 

 der, who pawed the earth when he heard the 

 shouting of the captains. At first he was used 

 not for riding, but to draw the war chariots. 

 Rameses and the Hittites decided their great 

 battles by chariot charges; the mighty and 

 cruel Assyrian kings rode to war and hunting 

 in chariots; the Homeric Greeks fought in 

 chariots ; Sisera ruled the land with his chariots 

 of iron ; and long after they had been abandoned 

 elsewhere war chariots were used by the cham 

 pions of Erin. Cavalry did not begin to super 

 sede them until less than a thousand years before 

 our era; and from that time until gunpowder 

 marked the beginning of the modern era the 

 horse decided half the great battles of history. 



But with this process primitive man had 

 nothing to do. He was and, in the few remote 

 spots where he still exists unchanged, he is 

 wholly unable even to conceive of systematic 

 war against the lion, or of trying to tame the 

 horse or elephant. These three, alone among 

 the big beasts of the giant fauna in which the 

 age of mammals had culminated, once throve 

 in vast numbers from the Cape of Good Hope 

 and the valley of the Nile northward to the 

 Rhone and the Danube, eastward across India 



