I 



ORIGIN OF DOMESTICATED ANIMALS 211 



know that the whole pack was upon his trail, not following 

 straight but circling round him in a gradually narrowing and 

 ultimately fatal spiral ; for, gaining confidence with exertion and 

 whetted hunger, the pack will ultimately make the charge at a 

 favorable moment after the quarry is at bay and shows the first 

 evidence of defenselessness. This is the natural method of the 

 shrewdest and most cowardly hunter the forest of nature ever 

 produced, and it is perfectly natural that such an animal should 

 have been not once but many times domesticated. Thus came 

 the dog to dwell among us. 



The horse (^Equus caballus). Unlike the dog, the horse has no 

 near relative in the wild ; that is to say, there is no existing wild 

 species that, by any stretch of the imagination, could be regarded 

 as the direct progenitor of the modern horse, or from which the 

 horse could by any possibility be developed. ^ If all the dogs of 

 the world should disappear, they could be reproduced from the 

 wild ; but if the domestic horse should disappear, he could not be 

 restored from any other existing species. 



While the immediate progenitor of the horse is, and likely, 

 has been for a long time, extinct, yet two significant facts re- 

 main. The first is, that he was almost certainly developed from 

 some primitive stock in or near the semiarid plains of Central 

 Asia, having wolves for his nearest neighbors and principal 

 enemies. The other fact is equally significant ; namely, that 

 while the immediate progenitor is lost, we really know more of 

 the ancestry and evolution of the horse than of any other animal 

 domesticated or wild, living or extinct.^ 



* Objection might be made to this statement on account of the Tarpan, or 

 so-called wild horse, which has been known on the steppes of Tartary and 

 eastward to Central Asia certainly since the time of Pallas (1760), though it is 

 now confined to the more remote regions of the interior. These animals are 

 true horses ; and if they are aboriginal stock, they are to be regarded as the 

 real progenitor of our domesticated race. It is more than likely, however, that 

 they are feral rather than truly wild. 



* For a more extended account of the origin of the horse and his evolution 

 upward, see " Principles of Breeding," pp. 298-305. 



