A VEIIY OLD MASTER 107 



loosely demarcated, while my old French bas-relief would 



fiill into the first. To put the date quite succinctly, I 



should say it was most likely about 244,000 years before 



the creation of Adam according to Ussher. 



The work of the old master is lightly incised on reindeer 



horn, and represents two horses, of a very early and heavy 



type, following one another, with heads stretched forward, 



as if sniffing the air suspiciously in search of enemies. 



The horses would certainly excite unfavourable comment 



at Newmarket. Their * points ' are undoubtedly coarse 



and clumsy : their heads are big, thick, stupid, and 



ungainly ; their manes are bushy and ill-defined ; their 



legs are distinctly feeble and spindle-shaped ; their tails 



more closely resemble the tail of the domestic pig than 



that of the noble animal beloved with a love passing the 



love of women by the English aristocracy. Nevertheless 



there is little (if any) reason to doubt that my very old 



master did, on the whole, accurately represent the ancestral 



steed of his own exceedingly remote period. There were 



once horses even as is the horse of the pre-historic 



Dordonian artist. Such clumsy, big-headed brutes, dun 



in hue and striped down the back like modern donkeys, 



did actually once roam over the low plains where Paris 



now stands, and browse off lush grass a-nd tall water-plants 



around the quays of Bordeaux and Lyons. Not only do 



the bones of the contemporary horses, dug up in caves, 



prove this, but quite recently the Russian traveller 



Prjevalsky (whose name is so much easier to spell than to 



pronounce) has discovered a similar living horse, which 



drags on an obscure existence somewhere in the high 



table-lands of Central Asia. Prjevalsky's horse (you see, 



as I have only to write the word, without uttering it, I 



don't mind how often or how intrepidly I use it) is so 



singularly like the clumsy brutes that sat, or rather stood, 

 8 



