530 THE HISTORY OF THE HORSE 



agile, and consequently possessed the facility of rallying and retreating with 

 greater rapidity than the somewhat bigger -framed Roman horse. This 

 breed appears to have been obtained originally from Etruria, and it was 

 upon horses of this kingdom that Romulus mounted his equites or cavalry. 

 These were also the animals which supplied the circus with its first equine 

 performers, and the battle-field with its charger; and there is little doubt 

 but that the size of the Roman horse was 'derived from the Etruscan. 

 Confirmation of this assertion is afforded by the discovery in an Etruscan 

 graveyard of a wall-painting on which horses are depicted so large as to 

 be quite out of proportion to the car to which they are attached. Whether 

 the carriage is drawn too small, or the horses too large, cannot now be 

 determined, but the i^icture, as it exists, suggests that the Etruscan horse 

 at that date was a large animal. During the incursions made by the 

 Romans into Germany and into Gaul large horses were found, and in 

 Bavaria and the neighbourhood large horse-shoes have been exhumed 

 from tumuli. The Germans are represented by Tacitus as a big race of 

 men possessed of great bodily strength, who devoted their life almost 

 exclusively to martial exercises and hunting, in the performance of which 

 they required large horses to carry them. These facts to a certain degree 

 show that an indigenous breed of large horses existed in mid-Europe, 

 which by admixture assisted in developing the tournament horse, and 

 ultimately in the production of the British wagoner. A large breed of 

 horses also existed in Spain before it was conquered by the Moors, and 

 these were probably the descendants of the horses on which the soldiers 

 of Hannibal at the battle of Cannas were mounted. In other parts of the 

 world there is no evidence of the existence of large horses; in fact they 

 seem generally to have been small, for the horse -shoes excavated from 

 tumuli evidently have been worn by ponies not 14 hands high, and 

 experience teaches us that the horse becomes small as he apjjroaches the 

 tropics and the Arctic regions, but that in a medium temperature, like that 

 of mid-Europe, he gains size, and, if he is combined with Arab blood, he 

 gains pluck and endurance also. In Asia, Africa, and North Europe the 

 native breeds of horses remain small, as they were in the past; and Caesar, 

 wdien he invaded our country, found only an indigenous race of small 

 ponies. England is now the possessor of the finest horses in the world, 

 both large and small, but she obtained the materials from which they were 

 bred from foreign countries — size from Flanders and Lombardy, and quality 

 and elea;ance of form from Africa and Arabia. 



