4 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



mate relations which these few surviving species hold to their 

 fossil ancestors, whose remains are profusely strewn in the 

 diluvial strata of the earth. 



The domestic horse, zoologically speaking, is known as the 

 Equus cahalhts, and was classed by Cuvier with the other 

 thick-skinned and non-ruminating mammals in that compre- 

 hensive order Pachydermata ; but which Professor Owen has 

 very justly subdivided on account of the three-fold variety in 

 the special details of structure thus included, and has placed 

 the horse together with all those hoofed animals which have 

 an odd number of toes, either one or three, in his well-chosen 

 order Perissodaclyla, in contradistinction to his even-toed 

 order, Artiodaclyla^ to which our cattle, deer, sheep, and 

 swine belong. 



The two preceding orders will be found, by a careful 

 analysis, to constitute a natural and well-marked anatomical 

 division of all the hoofed quadrupeds, both recent and fossil. 

 In view of which fact, naturalists have endeavored to trace 

 the ancestry of our equine and bovine races back to the 

 ancient prototypes of these two orders, which flourished ex- 

 tensively during an earlier epoch of creation. 



But in passing we would observe that though the Gnu or 

 " horned-horse" of Africa, very much resembles the wild 

 prairie horse in its general bodily conformation, jQt it is found, 

 by a moment's inspection, to have a divided hoof and all tlie 

 characteristic features of the antelope family, to which it 

 belongs. 



The history of the horse-family is veiled in remote antiquity. 

 Fossil remains of several extinct, but closely allied species, 

 have been found in the Tertiary deposits on both sides of the 

 Atlantic. 



There is a fossil skull of an extinct horse, Equus nomadicus^ 

 in the British Museum, taken by Messrs. Falconer & Cautley 

 from the Miocene formations in the Sewalk Mountains of 

 India, associated with the remains of gigantic Pachyderms, 

 Ruminants, and other extinct mammals, showing that the 

 horse in its pcdeontological lineage antedates the lapse of his- 

 toric time. But the most ancient representative of the fossil 



