CHAPTER IV. 



THE ORIGIN OF THE LIBYAN HORSE. 



The King, sir, hath wagered with him six Barbary horses. 



SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet, v. 2. 



WE have now briefly surveyed the history of all the chief 

 breeds of horses modern, medieval, and ancient and we have 

 been led steadily to the conclusion that the best horses are 

 sprung wholly or in part from a North African stock, the lightly 

 built horses excelling in speed being pure or almost pure 

 derivatives, whilst the large heavy cart-horse breed owes much 

 to the same blood when blended with the coarse, large-headed, 

 short-necked stock. Of the origin of the latter we have full 

 knowledge, for we have seen that it is the indigenous horse of 

 Upper Asia and Europe, and we have found a wild species of 

 Equidae Prejvalsky horse or the tarpan existing down to 

 our own time in Central Asia and Eastern Europe ; it has been 

 shown not unlikely that the ordinary Equus caballus of Europe 

 and Asia and the Prejvalsky horse have sprung from a common 

 immediate ancestor, or, what is less likely, that the former 

 has developed out of the latter. But it is altogether different 

 with the thoroughbred stock, inasmuch as Africa does not 

 possess any wild horses such as the tarpan, although she is the 

 mother of the Abyssinian ass, and at least three species of 

 zebras (not including the recently lost quagga). 



We have now to face the problem of the origin of this 

 Libyan horse, which I shall provisionally term Equus caballus 

 libycus. We have seen that it has been commonly held that 

 all our domestic horses have come from a single stock, a view 



