98 



THE HORSES OF PREHISTORIC 



[CH. 



Daily practice enabled them to pull up their horses when in 

 full speed on a slope or steep declivity, to check or to turn 

 them in a narrow space, to run 'out on the pole and stand on 

 the 3'oke, and to get nimbly back again into the chariot \" 



This statement, confirmed by other aucient writers^, puts it 

 beyond doubt that it was not lack of intrepidity or agility that 

 induced the Britons to drive their horses instead of mounting 

 on their backs, and also shows that their cars were not scythed. 



The evidence just offered for the diminutive size of the 

 Irish horse combined with the fact that in the oldest Irish epics 

 the horse is not ridden, for Cuchulainn and Queen Medhbh are 

 always represented as fighting in chariots, renders it highly 



Fig. 4-5. Bronze Bits: Ireland^. 



probable that here also the use of the chariot in a country 

 singularly difficult for vehicles was due at least in part to the 

 smallness of the steeds. 



It is not unlikely,, that as the domesticated horse was intro- 

 duced into Britain, so also was he brought into Ireland at no 

 very remote date, for all the bits and trappings hitherto known 

 belong to the Iron age in that country, where as I have 

 elsewhere argued iron found its way at a comparatively late 



1 B. G. IV. 33. - Juvenal, i\-. 126. 



^ The larger and more richly decorated bit is one of a pair found along with 

 a pair of the well-known spur-shaped objects, on the hard turf bottom of a bog 

 at Atymon, co. Mayo, in 1891. 



