THE GENEALOGY OF SHIPS. 303 



terested himself sufficiently in horse-lore to fit together 

 some fragments of equine genealogy, and make an exhi- 

 bition of them before the Geological Society of London.* 

 I believe that he and Albert Gaudry and Paul Gervais 

 had nearly convinced the geological savans of Europe that 

 their continent was the native land of the domestic horse, 

 and the whole line of his ancestry was European through 

 and through. But it is certain that Professor Marsh came 

 now to be regarded as fully demonstrating that the role 

 which the equine played in Europe was merely by-play, 

 and that America was both his primitive home and the 

 chief scene of the exploits of the whole line of equidse. 

 True it was that from time to time the existing repre- 

 sentatives of the equine lineage had wandered off to the 

 European extremity of the North Atlantic continent,! and 

 left their bones to stimulate the inquiries of "Old World" 

 geologists. True it was that the domestic horse had been 

 known through Europe and Asia during nearly the whole 

 stretch of human history, while he was wholly unknown 

 in America at the epoch of Columbus. But it appeared 

 also true that the real domestic horse had lived in Amer- 

 ica and become extinct here. And it was apparent that 

 representatives of the horse family had dwelt here in 

 times much more remote than the epoch of the oldest 

 known horses of Europe, and that the family had been 

 represented by a much greater diversity of specific forms. 

 It looked, in fact, as if America had been the original 

 home of the horse family, and the domestic species had 

 disappeared before historic times, simply because it had 

 already been so long a familiar and characteristic Ameri- 

 can form. 



*T. H. Huxley, Critiques and Addresset, 181-217, Anniversary Address, 1870. 

 tSee chapters iii and iv, especially the latter. 



