THE ANCESTRY OF THE HORSE 133 



between him and, for example, the great French Per- 

 cheron? There is only one way in which we can obtain 

 this knowledge, and but one method by which the rela- 

 tionship can be shown, and that is by collecting the fossil 

 remains of animals long extinct and comparing them 

 with the bones of the recent horse, a branch of science 

 known as Palaeontology. It has taken a very long time 

 to gather the necessary evidence, and it has taken a vast 

 amount of hard work in our western Territories, for 

 "the country that is as hot as Hades, watered by stag- 

 nant alkali pools, is almost invariably the richest in 

 fossils/' Likewise it has called for the expenditure of 

 much time and more patience to put together some of 

 this petrified evidence, fragmentary in every sense of 

 the word, and get it into such shape that it could be 

 handled by the anatomist. Still, the work has been 

 done, and, link by link, the chain has been constructed 

 that unites the horse of to-day with the horse of very 

 many yesterdays. 1 



J Many years ago in 1876, in his address on the "Demonstrative 

 Evidence of Evolution," Huxley said: 



". . . the general principles of the hypothesis of evolution lead 

 to the conclusion that the horse must have been derived from some 

 quadruped which possessed five complete digits on each foot; which 

 had the bones of the forearm and of the leg complete and separate; 

 and which possessed forty-four teeth, among which the crowns of the 

 incisors and grinders had a simple structure; while the latter gradually 

 increased in size from before backwards, at any rate in the anterior 

 part of the series, and had short crowns. 



And if the horse has been thus evolved, and the remains of the differ- 

 ent stages of its evolution have been preserved, they ought to present us 

 with a series of forms in which the number of the digits becomes re- 

 duced; the bones of the forearm and leg gradually take on the equine 

 condition; and the form and arrangement of the teeth successively 

 approximate to those which obtain in existing horses. 



Let us turn to the facts and see how far they fulfil these requirements 

 of the doctrine of evolution." 



