ORIGINAL HABITAT OF THE HORSE. 25 



dun, and hence it is argued that when the dun color appears in 

 our own day it must be taken as evidence that the original color 

 of the horse was dun. This reasoning is very far from being 

 conclusive, for there are dun horses and dun tribes in all breeds, 

 just as there are greys, and the color is just as liable to be trans- 

 mitted as any other color. In the last century there were many 

 dun horses in England, and at least one of that color was adver- 

 tised very widely as "the Dun Arabian," probably a foreign 

 horse, but it is hardly possible that he was an Arabian. It was then 

 the custom of the country to call all foreign horses "Arabians," 

 no difference from what part of the world they came. It has 

 been stated on what seemed to be good authority that a dun 

 horse once won the Derby, but whether the color may result from 

 line breeding or from atavistic tendencies, the argument advanced 

 does not seem to have any weight in it for the purpose intended. 



Another argument in favor of the wild and unknown regions 

 east and north of the Caspian as the habitat of the horse has 

 been urged with much more power and effect. It has been ac- 

 cepted and reiterated by so many learned men. one after another, 

 that I doubted the wisdom of attempting to overthrow it, until I 

 found the spot in which it was fatally weak. This view of the 

 question seems to rest upon the fact that the successive hosts of 

 Barbarians that overran Europe in the early centuries of the 

 Christian era brought their horses, as well as their flocks and 

 herds, with them, and it is assumed that these horses were the 

 first brought into Europe. This involves a total misconception 

 of dates; not of a few years merely, but of many centuries. All 

 of Europe, including Britain, and all of Northern Africa, were 

 abundantly supplied with horses, probably a thousand years 

 before the first destructive wave of Barbarians touched Europe. 

 Linguistic and ethnological facts clearly prove that those people 

 came from Asia, and possibly from a part of Asia where there 

 were horses running wild, but that does not prove that they came 

 from the original habitat of the horse. With no dates, either 

 definite or approximate, to support this theory, and with no 

 specific portion of the earth fixed upon as the general locality 

 from which they came, it resolves itself into a mere speculation 

 with nothing to support it, except the fact that different writers 

 have been copying it from one another, without throwing any 

 additional light upon it, for a number of generations. 



The most remarkable and at the same time the most untenable 



