30 THE EXISTING EQUIDAE [CH. 



At the time when Poliakoff's paper appeared zoologists 

 had settled down to a firm belief that no true wild horses 

 existed, or indeed had existed for a very long time, since 

 Sanson and Pietrement had concluded that all primitive wild 

 horses had disappeared in prehistoric times. True it was that 

 Pallas had declared that he had seen wild horses with suberect 

 manes in Tartary, and Moorcroft and the brothers Gerrard, 

 when they penetrated into Independent Tartary and within the 

 borders of China, met with numerous herds of wild horses, 

 scouring along the table-lands some 16,000 feet above the sea, 

 but it had become a matter of faith with many naturalists 

 that all the wild horses of Asia were sprung from the common 

 Russian country horses turned loose for want of fodder during 

 the siege of Azov in 1697. But in both the eighteenth and 

 nineteenth centuries there were not wanting those who 

 neither believed that all the known wild horses were genuine 

 nor yet committed themselves to the belief that none but 

 feral horses still survived. Thus Pallas, who had himself 

 travelled in Asiatic Russia, was inclined to the same belief as 

 his predecessor Forster, who was disposed to think that all the 

 wild horses in Asia from the Ukraine to Chinese Tartary were 

 descended from strayed domestic animals ; Pallas ^ himself 

 thought that all the wild horses from the Volga to the Ural 

 were the progeny of domestic animals, and that all those from 

 the Jaik, Don, and Bokhara were of the Kalmuck and Kirghis 

 breed, remarking that they are mostly fulvous, rufous and 

 Isabella, whilst he noticed that those on the Volga were usually 

 brown, dark-brown, and silver grey, some having white legs and 

 other signs of intermixture. Linnaeus'"' held that, though the 

 wild horses of the Don were sprung from the horses that 

 had escaped at the siege of Azov, true wild horses survived 

 in Bessarabia and Tartary, whilst Col. Hamilton Smith came 

 to similar conclusions from the information which he himself 

 obtained from Russian oflScei's of experience whom he met 

 in Paris at the time of its occupation by the Allies in 1814. 

 His statements are so important in reference to Prejvalsky's 



1 Travels in Russia and Northern Asia, Vol. i. pp. 376-8 (French trans.) ; 

 Vol. VII. pp. 89-92 ; PL I. (in atlas) shows a tarpan of the feral kind. 

 ^ Systema Naturae, p. 432 (Kerr's trans.). 



