ARABIAN HORSES. 259 



Upton concluded that the horse was found in Arabia 

 " not later than about one hundred years after the 

 deluge, ... if indeed he did not hud his way there 

 immediately after the exodus from the ark, which is 

 by no means improbable," and this probability the 

 author then proceeds seriously to consider. Accord- 

 ing to Major Upton and a few kindred spirits, all 

 other breeds are mongrels, and the only way to obtain 

 horseflesh in its best and purest form is to go back to 

 the fountain head, to the horse of the desert. 



Naturalists, I believe, have not yet determined 

 where the genus originated ; but they gather that 

 three allied animals, the tapir, the rhinoceros, and 

 the horse, have all descended from a common ances- 

 tor of the eocene period. Of these three, the tapir 

 and the rhinoceros certainly are found in many parts 

 of the world. The immediate precursor of the horse 

 was the small animal called Equida, which was ex- 

 ceedingly common both in America and in Europe. 

 Fossil skeletons have also been found in almost every 

 part of America, varying but slightly from the skel- 

 eton of the present horse, although externally the 

 animals which they represent may have differed from 

 him as widely as does the zebra. It is possible, 

 therefore, that, contrary to the usual opinion, horses 

 existed on this continent in a wild state before the 

 coming of the Spaniards. These facts as to the wide 

 distribution of both the ancestors and the first-cousins, 

 so to say, of the primitive horse, tend to show, al- 

 though of course they fail to prove, that he also was 



only a part of which, however, is deA*oterl to horseflesh ; and a paper 

 concerning Arabian Horses, published in Fraser's Magazine for 

 September, 1876. 



