416 THE HORSES OF PREHISTORIC [CH. 



best fillies, and at the present moment Ireland possesses only 

 some very old and degenerate specimens of an invaluable breed 1 , 

 the loss of which would be little short of a national disaster. 

 Every year the demand for Irish hunters becomes greater and 

 their value increases, and no matter what may be the fate of 

 other classes of horses owing to the competition of motor-cars, 

 the high-class Irish hunter is not likely to suffer through the 

 rivalry of any mechanical contrivance. It is earnestly to be 

 hoped that in view of the fatal damage done to the fine old 

 breeds of France by the unwise admixture of foreign strains, 

 and the like injury wrought to Irish horses by contamination 

 with Shire, Suffolk Punch, Clydesdale, Cleveland Bay, and 

 Hackney blood, no further rash experiments of this kind will 

 be tried, but that steps will be taken to rebuild the old breed of 

 Irish cart-horses by the careful selection for stud purposes of the 

 best of those which still survive. 



Let us now return to the horses of Scandinavia, the Faroes, 

 and Iceland. We saw above (p. 18) that from the absence of 

 hock callosities, the presence of short hair on the upper part of 

 the tail, the shortness of the ears (in which they differ from 

 Arabs), and the fineness of the head and limbs in certain 

 ponies found in Connemara, the North of Ireland, the Outer 

 Hebrides, Faroe Isles, and Iceland, Prof. Ewart was led to his 

 doctrine that a separate variety of horse, which he names 

 E. c. celticus, had survived from the Palaeolithic period in 

 the north-west of Europe. 



When and whence horses first reached Iceland we have 

 ample evidence. After Harold Fairhair had made himself sole 

 king in Norway in 870 A.D., many of the turbulent Norwegian 

 jarls preferred exile to submission. Among these were Ingolf 

 and Leif, who set forth to Iceland in 871 A.D., and finally 

 settled there in 874 A.D. Three years later Kettle Haeng led 

 a further body of settlers to the same island. Gradually Harold 

 Fairhair began to extend his authority and to root out the 

 Vikings from the Western Isles, and after the fall of Thorstein 

 the Red in Scotland there was a rush of settlers from the 

 British Isles to Iceland (890900). 



1 Journ. Dept. of Agriculture (Ireland), Oct. 1904, pp. 25 sqq. 



