IJ OF THE EQUIDAE 5 



each of which consists of several races, while Capt. M. H. Hayes ^ 

 maintains that " no breed of horses possesses any distinctive 

 characteristic which serves to distinguish it from other breeds." 

 Bat on Dec. 2nd, 1902, Prof J. Cossar Ewart, F.R.S., read 

 before the Royal Society of Edinburgh a paper in which 

 he pointed out the existence in the Western Islands of a 

 variety of horse hitherto unnoticed. A week earlier the 

 present writer had laid before the Cambridge Philosophical J^ 

 Society a summary of the evidence which led him to conclude 

 that the hitherto generally received notion that the Arab horse 

 was the ultimate source of our thoroughbred and half-bred 

 horses had no historical foundation, that the Arabs had only 

 got their iine breed of horses from North Africa at a period 

 later than the Christian era, and that on the other hand there 

 was the clearest evidence of the existence in Libya of a fine 

 breed of horses for a thousand years before the Arabs ever bred 

 a horse, and finally it was maintained that from this North 

 African stock all the best horses of the world have sprung, and 

 that it is a variety entirely distinct from the clumsy, thickset, 

 slow horses of Europe and Asia. 



The object of the following pages is to set out at length 

 the evidence for the conclusion just stated, and to trace the 

 important part played by this Libyan horse and its descendants 

 in the history of the world. 



It was only at a comparatively late epoch in the history 

 of mammals that the ancestors of the horse made their first 

 appearance, for it is not until the Tertiary period that hoofed 

 animals begin to occur. It is among two extinct families of the 

 Perissodactyles — the Lophiodontidae and the Palaeotheriidae — 

 that we meet what appear to be the earliest ancestral forms of 

 the horses and the tapirs of to-day, though it cannot be affirmed » 

 that an unbroken line of descent from any forms yet known can I 

 be made out for the existing Equidae. Yet we can at least \ 

 point to a series of forms, the salient osteological features of 

 which have led to a belief in the relationship of our horses 

 to these primeval Perissodactyles I We may start with certain 



' PoinU of the Horse (3rd ed., 1904), p. •422. 



2 Beddard, Mammalia (1902), pp. 247-8; Flower and Lydekker, Mavimals 

 (1891), p. 380. 



