WILD HOKSES. 25 



an original native of the soil of Africa, to wliich alone liis 

 congeners, the Zebra, and the Quagga, are indigenous, although 

 the wild ass and the domestic sjDecies are probably of Asiatic 

 origin. 



Of all the wild races now existing in Europe, Asia, or Ame- 

 rica, if any do still exist in the former division, it is, however, 

 so nearly susceptible of actual proof that no one is really indi- 

 genous, that we may safely hold it an established fact. 



The Tartarian breed, which are found wild, in countless 

 hordes, from the neighborhood of the Volga to the barren and 

 inhospitable steppes of Upper Asia and the northern provinces 

 of China, can be clearly traced to the cavalry liorses employed 

 in the siege of Azof, in. 1657, which were turned loose for 

 want of forage, and have propagated their species with unex- 

 ampled rapidity ; unless it be equalled by that which has peo- 

 pled all South America and all the sparsely cultivated districts 

 in the south-west of the northern continent, so far east as to the 

 Mississippi, with the descendants, either self-emancipated or 

 voluntarily released, of the Spanish horses, first introduced into 

 the southern continent in 1537. 



It is somewhat doubtful to me, whether the horses found in 

 a feral state, in Texas and the Mexican provinces, are not the 

 descendants of chargers escaped from the I'omantic expedition 

 of De Soto through those very regions ; rather than of those 

 liberated at the abandonment of Buenos Ayres, or of other 

 escaped or emancipated animals of Spanish breed, from the 

 southward of the Isthmus. Since the intricate, forest-cumbered 

 and brake-entangled nature of that dark and dangerous bridge 

 between the two portions of the continent, as well as of the 

 adjacent regions both to the north and south of it, is so ill- 

 adapted to an animal like the horse, attached to wide, open 

 plains and prairies, and singularly averse to woody morasses 

 and densely clothed wildernesses, that I cannot readily believe 

 they would voluntarily have involved themselves in those 

 labyrinths of canebrakes, lianas, and mazes of almost impene- 

 trable vegetation, in progress of unmeaning migration toward 

 unknown future habitations. 



The question, however, is one of little moment ; for, although 

 some equine fossil remains have been discovered in America, 



