12 ENGLAND'S HORSES, 



Rome found herself, when at the zenith of her power, in 

 possession of a famous breed of horses adequate to the 

 varied domestic duties of a peaceful existence, as well as to 

 the more important and arduous exigencies of war. What 

 the accident of circumstances and the practical policy of 

 other powers, over Avhich supremacy in arms had given her 

 dominance, had placed at her command in the way of 

 horses, she permitted to deteriorate, and censurably neg- 

 lected any system of improvement, or supply of a, no doubt, 

 valuable race of horses for their times and necessities. 



As from the Roman Invasion of Britain it is obvious the 

 native breed of these islands derived a direct and important 

 " cross," it will be well to glance at the sources from 

 whence the stock importing the primary blood and form of 

 our horses was derived. 



Fable and obscurity wrap the origin and early history of 

 the horse in mysticism. According to the Mosaic text, 

 Asia has given to him, as to man, and all animals that had 

 their prototypes in the Ark with Noah and his family, 

 their original existence. Sixteen hundred years before the 

 advent of the Messiah it is recorded that the horse was 

 used in Egypt. Zoologists acquaint us that the Equidce 

 are traced over a very vast surface of the Old World — 

 from the West of Ireland to Eastern Tartary, and, from the 

 Polar Regions to South of The Himalayas, and to an 

 unexhausted distance in Northern Africa. They argue 

 with every show of reason that, because their remains are 

 found in a fossil state co-existing with the debris of other 

 animals of a former zoology, that they must have existed in 

 the distribution of a period anterior to our own. A per- 

 tinent inference as to the high order of the animal horse in 

 the creation's scale resides in the fact that, while other 

 genera and species with which his fossilized remains have 

 been discovered have ceased to exist, or have removed to 



