PRODUCED BY MAN. 817 



was brought under domestication. This fact as given by Ahlquist 

 in his interesting work, 'Die Kulturworter der Westfinnischen 

 Sprachen/ 1875, p. 14, is to the efFect that the Tatars, by which 

 word he means presumably Turkic and Tungusic tribes in the 

 neighbourhood of the Lake Baikal, have words of their own for 

 ram and ewe, idkd, to wit, and sank, which the Tscheremissians, 

 who live now as far away from that lake as is the river Volga, use 

 as loan words. It is, I submit, not easy to imagine that a word 

 would have maintained its life thus intact and vigorous if the thing 

 which it represents had not been part of the national life of 

 the tribe using and retaining it. And this suggestion gains in 

 force when we learn from the same authority, 1. c, that the Hungarian 

 language has adopted Slavonic words for the ewe, the ram, and the 

 lamb, and find him deducing from this the conclusion that the 

 Hungarians, albeit a steppe tribe, had not been shepherds before 

 they came into relation with the Slavs. It may have been due to 

 this, but it may also have been owing to a prepotency either in the 

 Aryan language or in the pastoral craft of the Slav race. For 

 except upon one or other of these latter hypotheses, it is difficult to 

 see why the Tscheremissians on the Volga should have retained 

 their Mongolian names for the ewe and ram, whilst not only the 

 Hungarians but the Ostjaks, the Vogals, the Mordvins, the Syrians, 

 and the Wotjaks, from the Volga to the Irtisch, should be using more 

 or less modified Slavonian words for the same things. Anyhow, that 

 a lowly, organised language, such as the Tataric, should have words 

 of its own for the domestic ewe and ram, is a point of great signi- 

 ficance, especially when we consider that these Tatars lived around 

 the spurs of the Altai range on the lower and middle zones of 

 which the Argali was then, as now, available for the purposes of 

 domestication. 



Thirdly, of the horse. The fossil or semi-fossil bones of the horse, 

 Eqiius caballus, are found in the lower Thames valley gravels under 

 our feet, and from this area of the world's surface all the way to the 

 regions round the Lake Baikal; and in this latter district the 

 horse is found, as I think may be safely said, in a wild state at 

 the present day. It is true that a very large number of naturalists 

 of the first rank, such as Mr. Darwin and Mr. Wallace, have 

 acquiesced in the view which teaches that the so-called 'Tarpan' 

 is but a ' feral' animal, the offspring of runaway stallions and mares 



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