THE ASIATIC STEPPES AND THEIR FAUNA. 115 



wood on account of its extreme hardness and toughness, which baffles 

 the axe. It roots on those rare spots in the wilderness where the 

 rain-storms have washed together some poor red clay. There it 

 sometimes grows into bushwork of considerable extent, affording 

 shelter and shade to other plants, so that these green spots come to 

 look like little oases in the desert. But these oases are no more 

 lively than the dreary steppes around, for apart from a shrike, the 

 white-throat, and a wood- wren, one sees no bird, and still less any 

 mammal. On the other hand, amid the desolation there live some 

 of the most notable of the steppe animals, along with others which 

 occur everywhere; besides the short-toed lark and calandra lark 

 there is the coal-black Tartar lark, which those aware of the general 

 colour-resemblance between ground-birds and the ground would 

 naturally look for on the black earth. Along with the small plover 

 there is the gregarious lapwing, along with the great bustard the 

 slender ruffed bustard, which the Kirghiz call the ambler, along with 

 the sand-grouse there is Pallas's sand-grouse or steppe-grouse. 24 It 

 was this last bird which some years ago migrated in large num- 

 bers into Germany and settled on the dunes and sandy places, but 

 was so inhospitably received by us, so ruthlessly persecuted with 

 guns, snares, and even poison, that it forsook our inhuman country 

 and probably returned to its home. Here, too, along with the 

 specially abundant souslik, there are steppe antelopes and the Kulan, 

 the fleet wild horse of the steppes. I must restrict myself to giving 

 a brief sketch of the last, so as not to overstep too far the limits of 

 the time allowed me. 



If Darwin's general conclusions be reliable, we may perhaps 

 regard the kulan as the ancestor of our horse, which has been 

 gradually improved by thousands of years of breeding and selec- 

 tion. This supposition is more satisfactory than the vague and 

 unsupported assertion that the ancestor of our noblest domestic 

 animal has been lost, and to me it is more credible than the 

 opinion which finds in the Tarpan which roams to-day over the 

 Dnieper steppes an original wild horse, and not merely one that has 

 reverted to wildness. 25 As recent investigations in regard to our 

 dogs, whose various breeds we cannot compute with even approxi- 



