THE HORSE AND HIS PEDIGREE. 153 



we oiiglit more correctly to say, a donkey-like ani- 

 mal arrested on its way to become a liorse, and 

 preserved for us by some lucky chance through so 

 many ages in that remote and inaccessible region. 

 What renders this conclusion the more probable 

 is the interesting fact that we still possess some 

 excellent though very ancient portraits of ex- 

 tremely early European horses, scratched for us 

 with the points of flint knives on broken frag- 

 ments of reindeer-horn or mammoth-tusks by the 

 dark and slouching prehistoric savages who dwelt 

 among the caverns of Southern France while the 

 great woolly elephant still roamed over the frozen 

 plains of glacial Europe, and the cave-bear and 

 hyena still sought their prey beside the ancient 

 valleys of the Seine and the Dordogne. In these 

 very antique sketches we are shown the counter- 

 feit presentment of the wild horses which the men 

 of the period stalked and ate, but had never learnt 

 to catch and domesticate in their own service. 

 The outline thus rudely engraved on a bit of bone 

 or a fragment of antler shows us an animal with 

 a large head, thick neck, and big mane, coarse and 

 clumsy in all its points, but exactly like Prjeval- 

 sky's horse, and, what is still more important to 

 notice, with the hairs of its tail s[)ringing, as in 

 the newly discovered species, from half way down 

 the stump only. There can be very little doubt, 

 therefore, that at the date of the Glacial Period or 



