92 THE HORSES OF PREHISTORIC [CH. 



remains being found in any long barrows. "The bones of the 

 horse," says Prof. Rolleston 1 , " are both durable and conspicuous, 

 and it is difficult to think that if the Neolithic man had used 

 the animal either for purposes of food or for those of carriage, 

 as his predecessors and successors did, we should not have come 

 upon abundant and unambiguous evidence of such use." 



Lord Avebury has shown that of the 28 cases given by 

 Mr Bateman in which the bones and teeth of horses occurred, 

 " nine were in tumuli which had been previously opened, and in 

 one case no body was found. Of the remaining 18 five were 

 tumuli containing iron, and seven were accompanied with 

 bronze. In one more case, that of the 'Liffs,' it is doubtful 

 whether the barrow had not been disturbed. Of the remaining 

 six tumuli, two contained beautiful drinking vessels of a very 

 well-marked type, certainly in use during the Bronze age, if not 

 peculiar to it; and in both these instances, as well as in a third, 

 the interment was accompanied by burnt human bones, sug- 

 gestive of dreadful rites." Out of 297 interments only 63 

 contained metal, or about 21 per cent., while out of the 18 

 barrows with horses' remains, twelve, or about 66 per cent., 

 certainly belonged to the age of metals. 



Later on I shall offer an argument to show that the use of 

 the horse by man in the British Isles cannot be placed before 

 the end of the Bronze or the beginning of the Iron age. This 

 would be completely in accord with the view commonly held 

 that the primeval horses of Britain whose bones are found in 

 the caves became extinct, and that the horse was reintroduced 

 from the Continent at no long time before the dawn of history. 



Passing to the Continent we find that there is but scant 

 evidence of the horse in Neolithic times in the Swiss Lake- 

 dwellings, for though Rutimeyer 2 held that the horse had been 

 domesticated by the Swiss Lake-dwellers in the Neolithic 

 period, he himself contrasts the extreme paucity of the remains 

 of that animal in the oldest settlements such as Wangen, 

 Moosseedorf, Robenhausen, and Wauwyl, as compared with 

 their abundance in the Bronze age stations. It is generally 



1 Greenwell, British Barrows, p. 736. 



2 Die Fauna der Pfahlbauten in der Schweiz (1861), p. 122. 



