488 THE DEVELOPMENT OF EQUITATION [CH. 



mule-car in the Homeric passages just cited, and we also learn 

 that Nausicaa's mules trotted briskly off with the waggon, it is 

 most unlikely that the Homeric waggon had block wheels. 



Now, as the Homeric mule-car, the classical mule-car, and 

 the Thracian ox-cart about B.C. 500 all have spoked wheels, there 

 is therefore no evidence for the existence of the use of solid 

 wheels under either mule-car or ox-cart in early times in the 

 countries round the Aegean. If such did once exist there 

 before the invention of the spoked wheel, it must have been 

 at a time anterior to the appearance of the horse both on the 

 monuments of -Egypt and on the tombstones of Mycenae. But 

 it has just been shown that the use of the ox-cart for agriculture 

 at so early a period is extremely unlikely. Accordingly, so far 

 from the ox-cart with solid wheels being the precursor of the 

 chariot, it is most likely that the latter was the first to be in- 

 vented for purposes of war, and that later a stronger and 

 cheaper form of vehicle for oxen was modelled after the chariot 

 for everyday use — a simple platform on which a wicker creel 

 or crate like that of the Homeric mule-car could be placed. 



Of course it will be said that block wheels survived in the 

 British Isles down to our own time, — that in 1775 goods 

 Avere conveyed about Dublin on carts furnished with solid wheels 

 about 20 inches in diameter, that solid-wheeled carts may still 

 be seen in the North of Ireland from Donegal to Down, 

 and that two kinds of block-wheeled carts were in use in 

 Inverness about 1730, both of them being simply modifications 

 of the slide-car still surviving in Antrim, with wheels about a 

 foot and a half high, but which were soon worn very small. 

 Yet it must not be assumed that such wheels were the first 

 kinds known in all these localities. It is most improbable that 

 any kind of wheeled cart was in use in Ireland in early times, 

 yet there were war-chariots with spoked w^heels in Ireland at 

 the time of Christ. Again, it is on record that in Borrowdale 

 wheeled vehicles did not make their appearance until about 

 1770; and when these novelties did reach the lakes they were 

 clumsy and awkward in character. Clog- wheels were the first type 

 used on farm carts, yet spoked wheels had long been in general 

 use all over England, and had been known in the island from 



