50 THE HOUSE OF AMERICA. 



ent colors "of grey, shading into white/' which suggests a possi- 

 ble descent from the famous breed of white Nissaean horses kept, 

 by the great Darius and other Medo-Persian monarchs for racing 

 purposes. But the striking feature in this description of the 

 horses of Persia, or more properly, of ancient Armenia, of this 

 day, is the fact that they are of the same size and color and 

 habits of action as the horses of Britain when first visited by the 

 Eomans, as well as when they were more minutely described 

 twelve hundred years later, and as they were at the beginning of 

 the seventeenth century, and as they still were at the middle of 

 the eighteenth century. As evidence on these points reference 

 is made to the chapters on horses of the colonial period that will 

 follow in their place. In ancient Armenia, as with all pastoral 

 people of the early ages, horses were turned out to run in herds 

 and literally left to Mr. Darwin's law of "natural selection and 

 the survival of the fittest." So it was in Britain to a great ex- 

 tent, until the eighteenth century, and so it was in the American 

 colonies until fifty years later; hence the same types and charac- 

 teristics prevailed and were perpetuated in all these countries. 



It is sad to contemplate the present debased and semi-barbarous 

 condition of the descendants of a great people who for centuries 

 stood first among all the nations of the earth in commercial en- 

 terprise, in learning, and in the arts. The banishment of the 

 Saracens from Spain in the beginning of the seventeenth century 

 of our era was in fact the banishment of the descendants of the 

 Phoenicians who first colonized Spain. The architectural struc- 

 tures which they left behind them, and which for their marvelous 

 beauty have challenged the admiration of the world, were not 

 the work of nomads and barbarians. They were the flashes of 

 the old Phoenician taste and genius as exemplified by the de- 

 scendants of the men whom Hiram sent to construct and decorate 

 the buildings of Solomon. The Alhambra and some other struc- 

 tures in Spain are all that we have to remind us of the genius 

 and grandeur of Phoenicia. Whatever may have been the char- 

 acter and attainments of the descendants of the colonists at the 

 time, the change from idolatry to Islamism was a bad one. 

 Wherever, throughout the world, the teachings of the "Prophet" 

 have been accepted, whole nations have become intolerant, mur- 

 derous and brutalized, and the modern Phoenicians are no excep- 

 tion. They have now lost their identity in the follies and crimes, 

 of Islamism and we can have no sympathy for them. 



