portion of their languages, and even a smack of their religion ; but it 

 remained to the Spaniards to bestow the horse upon them. The large 

 and fertile island of Formosa is but eighty miles distant from the popu- 

 lous coast of China, but the Chinese had never occupied it until 

 Europeans showed them the way to it only two centuries ago. They 

 have ever since then occupied it, colonized it, and drawn large resources 

 from it, but down to this day have not introduced the horse. 



Attempts have been often made to trace the first domestication of 

 the horse to a particular country, but the inquiry seems to me an idle 

 and unnecessary one. Wherever the horse existed in its wild state it 

 would very easily be domesticated, and, consequently, in many different 

 and independent localities. It was not found domesticated in America, 

 or Australia, or the Isles of the Pacific Ocean, because in these parts of 

 the world it did not exist in the wild state, and, in a rude state of 

 society, it could not possibly have been conveyed to them from countries 

 in which it was indigenous. The case was different with the dog : 

 it existeil, most probably, in all the countries in question in the wild 

 state, and was consequently found in the domesticated in all of them. 



The era of the first domestication of the horse must have been very 

 remote indeed, for it required but a very small amount of civilization in 

 the men who achieved it. This is sufficiently proved by the fact that 

 some of the rude tribes of America had, within fifty years of the dis- 

 covery of the New World, domesticated the horse, already become wild, 

 — and that they have ever since continued to make use of it; and, by so 

 doing, been able to maintain a rude independence, assuming, in some 

 degree, the nomadic habits of Arabs and Tartars. 



The domestic, but not the wild or the feral horse, is a frequent 

 subject of representation on the monuments of Egypt, estimated to be 

 of an antiquity of some forty centuries; but this is very far from 

 carrying us back to the first domestication of the horse, for when the 

 Egyptian sculptures and paintings were executed the Egyptians were 

 in possession of many of the useful arts, and had even invented letters, 

 — were, in fact, an ancient civilized people, and, for aught we know to 

 the contrary, the horse may have been domesticated in Egypt four 

 thousand years before the time in which it was represented on its 

 monuments. If this reasoning be valid, the probability is that the horse 

 was just as early domesticated in other parts of the Old World, from 

 the British islands to Japan, as it was in Egypt. 



The first use to which the horse would be put must have depended 

 on the characters of the people and country in which it w.is domesti- 



I 



