26 THE HOESE OF AMEEICA. 



of all the claims that have been urged about the horse is that he 

 was indigenous in Arabia. We can tolerate any number of foolish 

 claims set up to show that the Arabian horse is superior to all 

 others, for such assertions can be tested and disproved, as they 

 have been a thousand times, but the claim that Arabia was the 

 original habitat of the horse is so utterly preposterous, and yet so 

 widely advocated by writers and others who know nothing about 

 it, that we must consider it with some brief deliberation. When 

 the maimed and crippled horses of De Soto were turned loose and 

 abandoned on the plains of Texas, they had all around them the 

 means of an abundant and healthy subsistence, and they multi- 

 plied and grew into an innumerable host that made the earth 

 tremble when they moved in great masses. Under the same 

 favorable conditions of water and pasture, the same results fol- 

 lowed on the pampas of South America. Upon the early settle- 

 ment of Virginia, as well probably as in some of the other 

 colonies, and within two hundred years, many of the horses of 

 the colonists strayed away, became wild and remained so, prop- 

 agating and increasing for generations, and until the growing 

 numbers of their former masters captured or exterminated them. 

 The varied herbage of the forest and its grassy swales, and 

 streams of pure water everywhere, made Virginia a paradise for 

 the horse in his feral state. 



Buffon, the French naturalist of a hundred and fifty years ago, 

 notices the theory of the wild horses of Arabia, but he is careful 

 not to commit himself nor indorse it in any form. In Vol. I., p. 

 237, he says: "According to Mannol, the Arabian horses are de- 

 scended from the wild horses in the deserts of Arabia, of which, 

 in ancient times, large studs were formed/' etc. In going fur- 

 ther, to find where Mannol got his information, it appears that 

 somebody, with an unpronounceable name that I have forgotten, 

 told him so. Major Upton, a very intelligent but very credulous 

 modern writer on what he saw and learned in the desert, says he 

 never heard of this story of wild horses in Arabia, and pro- 

 nounces it a "fallacy." When we consider that Arabia never was 

 conquered and the reason why, although Home, at the very culmi- 

 nation of her power, followed by Assyria and Egypt, all failed of 

 their purpose without meeting an enemy in battle, we must ac- 

 cept the fact that nature had interposed a barrier that military 

 power could not surmount. The barrenness and aridity of the 

 desert has always protected the Arabs against the most power- 



