INTRODUCTION. 91 



the capture of wild horses be recorded and be fact, 

 we may rest assured that the term means either feral 

 animals, or, by misnomer, the wild ass of the desert. 



In Europe, where there is reason to believe wild 

 horses existed, and in particular among the Celtas, 

 acquaintance with a domesticated breed seems to 

 date, on the continent, from the period when the 

 Celto-Scythic and Centomannic Gauls ascended the 

 Danube and crossed the Rhine, and in Britain when 

 commerce with Phoenician merchants first intro- 

 duced some practices of Asiatic origin ; for the for- 

 mer were riders, having the well known system of 

 trinal arrangement, called trimarchesia*^ in their 

 cavalry, and the latter were charioteers to the time 

 when the Romans first crossed the Channel ; the first, 

 therefore, had habits analogous to the manners of 

 the north, the second to those of the south of Asia. 



It is to the beginning of the period when con- 

 quering horsemen had spread to the south and west 

 of the old world, that is, between the seventeenth 

 and fourteenth centuries before the Christian era, 

 that the veneration attached to the horse may have 

 commenced ; though, no doubt, a date still earlier 

 must be fixed when the zodiacal belt was deter- 

 mined ; t for, in the houses of the sun, no horse is 



Jerusalem, their shaggy maned dun ponies were described and 

 figured in Europe like lions, and the riders like Chinese. See 

 MS. Marino Zanuti, Burgundy Library, Brussels, 1326. 



* Noticed in Pausanias, seemingly from the Celtic tri-march- 

 kesec, that is, three horses combined, a knight and his two 

 squires. 



t Bailly and others have satisfactorily shown the earliest 

 astronomical observations to have been made, and the zodiacal 



