1.4 England's horses, 



out at short notice six hundred chariots of war — " all the 

 chariots of Egypt." Little reliance can be placed in pro- 

 fane historians, and poetical records are not history; but 

 the treatment of the Centaurs, the characters of themselves 

 and horses, though evidently fabulous, lead to a reasonable 

 deduction of a race of horse-men and horses from a basis 

 of truth wrought into imagery and fiction. These fabled 

 beings, but, doubtless, cavalry invaders, belong to the 

 earliest descent of mounted hordes from Central Asia upon 

 Thrace and Thessaly by North of the Black Sea. and across 

 the Lower Danube. It has been inferred that the fabled 

 Centaurs were, in realitj^the bold horsemen of the northern 

 Scythpe of High Asia. The period of this raid or invasion 

 synchronises with the heroic age of Greece, and is suffi- 

 ciently near the periods of the expulsion of the Grazier or 

 Shepherd invaders, the invasion of Asia by Sesostris or 

 Rameses IL and III, and the Indian Epic legends, to esta- 

 blish the epoch of great movements through all the regions 

 in question, and fix the period when horse, chariot, and 

 rider first make their appearance. But it is worthy of 

 notice here that (in Genesis xlix. 17) there is an anterior 

 evidence that riding was not unknown in the days of Jacob 

 — " An adder in the path, that biteth the horse's heels, so 

 that his rider falleth backwards."* 



Although it has been attempted to confer upon Africa 

 the honour of having supplied to Egypt horses, in an 

 almost wild state, for subjugation and use, still, from the 

 fact of there being no true indigenous feral horse in Africa, 

 and as the current of human civilization did not certainly 

 set in from Africa to the North-East, while Egypt was not 

 a country for wild horses when the domesticated first 

 appeared there, and that the elements of progressive cul- 



* Note. — I acknowledge my otligations to Colonel Smith and other 

 authors. 



