302 Messrs Marshall and Annandale, 



countries, quite possibly from the Mediterranean coasts, as well as 

 North- Western Europe. Indeed, the heads of the Icelandic horses 

 in a mediaeval engraving 1 preserved in the National Library at 

 Reykjavik and reproduced on a small scale by Bruun, are, in some 

 cases, rather large and heavy, though the joints are small and the 

 legs slender, while Landt, writing at the commencement of the 

 nineteenth century, described the heads of the Faroe ponies as 

 being ' thick and drooping.' All that we say on this point is that 

 the characters of these breeds show an approximation to a certain 

 ideal type, living representatives of which have been found in 

 the Hebrides and north Ireland by Professor Ewart, but which 

 probably no longer exists in a pure state, even as a breed, any- 

 where in the world. 



This type, unlike the 'cart-horse type,' has no wild repre- 

 sentative at the present day, though the researches of Capitan 

 and Breuil (10), (11), and others show that horses at any rate 

 closely approximating to it existed wild at the epoch geologically 

 recent. These researches, however, are based on the rude sketches 

 of contemporary man and on osseous remains, and it is therefore 

 impossible that they should throw light on the question of the 

 comparative development of the hock callosities, which are re- 

 markably large in Prjevalsky's horse — the modern wild congener of 

 the Palaeolithic heavy-headed, thick-jointed form — and are well 

 developed in the modern Norwegian and Mongol ponies. Professor 

 Ewart's investigations, on the other hand, would seem to prove 

 that these callosities were reduced, if not altogether absent, in 

 the ancestor of the pony type, for he has shown that it is in 

 individuals which have the 'pony' characteristics most distinctly 

 marked that these structures, which are vestigial in all known 

 Equidae, have the greatest tendency to disappear. It is possible, 

 of course, that the disappearance of the hock callosities has been 

 approached more nearly in those breeds of mixed origin, in which 

 the 'pony' type predominated, than in the pure-bred ancestor 

 of this type, but no known factor in this case would lead us 

 to believe that the result of cross-breeding has been to pro- 

 duce a character which was originally absent from both lines of 

 descent. 



Granted, then, that the modern domestic horse has been pro- 

 duced, at any rate in Western Europe, by the admixture of two 

 forms which were distinct in Palaeolithic times, and granted, as 

 we think Professor Ewart has shown, that one of these two forms 

 has been the predominant partner in the ancestry of a proportion 

 of the individuals now living in certain of the Outer Hebrides 



1 There is a large photograph of this engraving in the Pitt Rivers Museum at 

 Oxford. 



