58 DOMESTICATED ANIMALS 



Although there are half a score of other animals which have 

 done much for man, which have indeed stamped themselves 

 upon his history, no other creature has been so inseparably 

 associated with the great triumphs of our kind, whether won 

 on the battle-field or in the arts of peace. So far as material 

 comfort, or even wealth, is concerned, we of the northern 

 realms and present age could, perhaps, better spare the 

 horse from our present life than either sheep or horned 

 cattle ; but without this creature it is certain that our 

 civilization would never have developed in anything like its 

 present form. Lacking the help which the horse gives, it is 

 almost certain that, even now, it could not be maintained. 



We know the ancient natural history of the horse more 

 completely than that of any other of our domesticated 

 animals. We can trace the steps by which its singularly 

 strono- limbs and feet, on which rests its value to man, were 

 formed in the great laboratory of geologic time. The story 

 is so closely related to the interests of man that it will be 

 well briefly to set it before the reader. In the first stages of 

 the Tertiary period, in the age when we begin to trace the 

 evolution of the suck-giving animals above the lowly grade 

 in which the kangaroos and opossums belong, we find the 

 ancestors of our mammalian series all characterized by rather 

 weakly organized limbs fitted, as were those of their remoter 

 kindred the marsupials, for tree climbing rather than for 

 moving over the surface of the ground. The fact is, that all 

 the creatures of this great clan acquired their properties of 

 body in arboreal life, and with such relatively small and 

 licfht bodies as were fitted for tree climbincr. For this use 

 the feet need to be loose-jointed, and so the system of five 

 toes, each terminating in a sharp and strong nail or claw. 



