Ill] AND HISTORIC TIMES 125 



typical Icelandic breed (p. 24), was not the usual type of 

 animal in use in Iceland and Scandinavia in the tenth century. 

 The fact that dun-coloured ponies with black dorsal stripes 

 were regarded as exceptional by the Norsemen of that period 

 will be of considerable importance in a later stage of this 

 inquiry. 



We have already seen that the Sarmatians, who by the 

 time of Christ were dwelling on the east of the Teutonic 

 peoples, were well furnished with horses. But the evidence 

 of other writers makes it clear that for many centuries before 

 that epoch the Sarmatians and Scythians principally subsisted 

 on the flesh and milk of these animals, which they likewise 

 employed in war and the chase. Strabo^ has left us some 

 valuable evidence respecting the horses and horsebreeding of 

 these two peoples : " All the Scythian and Sarmatian tribes 

 have the peculiar custom of gelding their horses to make 

 them docile. For their horses, though small, are very spirited 

 and difficult to manage. They hunt stags and wild boars in 

 the marshes, and wild asses {onagri) and roes on the plains." 



The method employed by the Scythians and Sarmatians 

 for rendering their horses more manageable is that followed 

 regularly in modern times by the Kalmuck Tartars, with their 

 domestic horses^ and by both the Querenda Indians and the 

 Gauchos of the Pampas when they capture the haguals or feral 

 horses for domestication'. 



It is difficult to say to what race of onager or hemionus 

 belonged the wild asses hunted by the Sarmatians and Scythians, 

 a doubt which also arose when we spoke of 'wild mules' in Cap- 

 padocia. 



We have seen reasons for believing that there were once 

 not merely feral, but genuine wild tarpans in the steppes of 

 the Caspian. This is curiously confirmed by the statement 

 of Herodotus^ that "around a great lake from which issued 

 the river Hypanis (the modern Bug) there grazed wild white 

 horses"; a fact of considerable importance, whether the animals 



1 312. 2 Hamilton Smith, The Horse, p. 273. 



" Felix Azara, The Natural History of the Quadrupeds of Paraguay and the 

 River La Plata, p. 7 (trans, by W. Perceval Hunter). * rv, 52, 



