THE HORSE IN MOTION. 



CHAPTER I. 



INTRODUCTORY. 



THE Horse, of all animals, holds the most important relations to 

 the human family. Though the earliest traces of his existence on the 

 globe are found as fossils in North America, as an historical char- 

 acter he is traced to Central Asia with the Caucasian race. There 

 was no representative of the race living in America at the time of 

 the discovery of the New World, but it was introduced by Columbus 

 and his followers, and its descendants became feral on the Prairies 

 of North and the Pampas of South America. They were undoubt- 

 edly of Arabian stock, through the Moors ; small, active, and hardy. 

 Their descendants were very numerous in what were the northern 

 provinces of Mexico, previous to the invasion of Texas. 



The genera were well represented in Africa and the deserts of 

 Arabia, but we have no evidence that the historic horse was known 

 in Africa before the time of Rameses the Great, in the Eighteenth 

 Dynasty, after the wars with the Persians. Nowhere in all the tem- 

 ples and tombs of Memphis, Sais, Abydos, of the First Empire, is 

 there a sculpture that could lead us to infer that the horse was 

 known to the Egyptians of that early age. There are no sculptures 

 in India older than the dawn of Buddh, or about five centuries 

 before our era. The oldest written account of the horse is found in 

 the book of Job, and that is a very spirited description of a war-horse; 

 and it is probable that that is the oldest of the sacred writings of 

 the Hebrews, though there is no clew to the date or origin of that 

 curious production. 



