But it was long ages before the horse was capable even of carrying a man, let alone a warrior 

 weighed down with casque and breastplate. In fact, if we go far enough back — some fifty 

 million years — we find the ancestor of the horse an insignificant four-toed creature the size 

 of a hare with a name almost as long as itself, for the zoologists call it Hyracotherium and 

 say that it roamed the earth during the Eocene age. 



With time — and time indeed is relative, so that 'a thousand ages are like an evening gone' 

 — this dwarf flourished and became twice the size and acquired a new name, Mesohippus. 

 A mere twenty odd million years ago it had made still further progress and was now the 

 Merychippus, a genus which developed into the Pliohippus which was approaching the size 

 of a Shetland pony, and so at last to the genuine Equus which walked on one toe only, indeed 

 we could say on its toe-nail, for that is what its hoof consists of as anyone who has seen 

 a neglected horse will realise. In this it is unique and has been one of the most absorbing 

 examples in evolution and you can still see the link with the far-off Hyracotherium in the 

 vestiges of the toes on a horse's fore-legs. 



The first record we have of Man's interest in horses is embodied in the exciting paintings on 

 the walls of such caves as Lascaux in the Dordogne or Altamira in Spain and the more recently 

 discovered caves of the Sahara. These remarkable paintings are of wild horses that roamed 

 all over the vast plains of Europe and Asia; prehistoric man hunted them for their flesh as he 

 hunted the bison and the deer. In some countries the taste for horse-flesh still continues and 

 in Paris it is so accepted that horse butchers exhibit a special sign of a horse's head in gilt. 

 Nowadays the direct descendants of those same wild horses linger on in Mongolia, an echo 

 of the days when our ancestors went about in skins and stumbled upon such wondrous 

 discoveries as smelting iron. 



Secure in its swiftness, the horse kept its freedom for a long time. The dog and the ox 

 and the ass had all gone into human bondage long before the first horse felt a man's knees 

 gripping its sides and squealed in fury at the insult. It must indeed have made that man seem 

 a very god as he rode astride what he considered the most splendid animal in creation and 

 it is easy to understand how the myth of the Centaur, half man, half horse, grew up. To men, 

 perhaps of the forest, who had not yet encountered the horse, the first sight of a mounted 

 man must have been an awe-inspiring moment, just as the Araucanian Indians were won- 

 derstruck by the mounted warriors of Cortez and Pisarro who brought the horse to the New 

 World. 



