X 



THE ANCESTRY OF THE HORSE 



"Said the little Eohippus 



I am going to be a horse 

 And on my middle finger-nails 

 To run my earthly course." 



The American whose ancestors came over in the 

 " May flower" has a proper pride in the length of the 

 line of his descent. The Englishman whose genealogical 

 tree sprang up at the time of William the Conqueror has, 

 in its eight centuries of growth, still larger occasion for 

 pluming himself on the antiquity of his family. But 

 the pedigree of even the latter is a thing of yesterday 

 when compared with that of the horse, whose family 

 records, according to Professor Osborn, reach backward 

 for something like 2,000,000 years. 1 And if, as we have 

 been told, "it is a good thing to have ancestors, but 

 sometimes a little hard on the ancestor," in this instance 

 at least the founders of the family have every reason to 

 regard their descendants with undisguised pride. For 

 the horse family started in life in a small way, and the 

 first of the line, the Eohippus, was "a little animal no 

 bigger than a fox, and on five 2 toes he scampered over 

 Tertiary rocks/' in the age called Eocene, because it was 

 the morning of life for the great group of mammals 

 whose culminating point was man. At that time, west- 

 ern North America was a country of many lakes, for 

 the most part comparatively shallow, around the reedy 

 margins of which moved a host of animals, quite unlike 



'This is a minimum estimate, made twenty years ago and the time is 

 now regarded as vastly longer, even so great as 25,000,000 years. 



2 Four, to be exact; but we prefer to sacrifice the foot of Eohippus 

 rather than to take liberties with one of the feet of Mrs. Stetson's poem. 



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