FERAL HORSES. 173 



We shall see in the description of the koomrah how 

 much the love of the marvellous may mislead the 

 ignorant natives, and through them naturalists bet- 

 ter informed than Oppian. The wild horses seen 

 by Leo, Marmol, Struys, Bruce, and produced by 

 the Emperor Gordian, may indeed be partly of 

 feral origin, and the rest the species above noticed, 

 or the wild ass, which is found along the White 

 Nile as far as it has been discovered ; but no other 

 wild Equus is described in Africa on this side of the 

 equator. 



FERAL HORSES OF AMERICA. 



Having endeavoured to show the real existence of 

 wild horses on the soil where the unsubdued species 

 must have roamed in freedom, and where at no 

 time the enterprise of man can have entirely extir- 

 pated them ; since it could not, even if the present 

 races were feral, prevent their again multiplying and 

 resuming the characters of aboriginal independence, 

 is in itself, we think, sufficient proof to establish 

 the argument : ^^e may therefore, after admitting a 

 partial intermixture of the domestic species with 

 <- the wild in Asia, take a view of those of America, 

 where they were found in such prodigious numbers, 

 shortly after the first settlements of the Spaniards, 

 that it required the united testimony of the abori- 

 ginals, and the evidence of the terror they at first 

 excited, to establish the absolute credibility of their 

 having been imported. In their appearance, more- 



