38 



what we may call " effective " toes, can in no way be regarded as 

 artificial, for along with the digital alterations, others have kept 

 pace in teeth, skull, vertebral column, digestive organs, &c. 



At the present time the odd-toed group is far less numerous than 

 the other, both in varieties and in individuals ; but in the earlier 

 times it seems to have far outnumbered it. Throughout middle 

 and later Tertiary times the odd-toed species have been continually 

 decreasing, the Horse itself having died out in America ; while the 

 even-toed kinds have rapidly increased, and are at present the 

 more numerous, though man in his love of so-called " sport " has, 

 during the last twenty-five or thirty years, been doing his best to 

 reduce them. 



Let us now for the remainder of our paper confine our attention 

 to the Horse. But it must be remembered that we are not 

 concerned this evening with what may be styled the artificial 

 varieties, such as the racehorse, American trotter, Suffolk or 

 Clydesdale cart-horse, &c. All these owe their being as such to 

 human care and ingenuity ; we are to take the true natural "wild" 

 horse as our starting point. Where shall we find it ? the true wild 

 horse ? Numerous herds of horses running wild are known in Austra- 

 lia, New Zealand, Falkland Isles, N. and S. America, &c., but in each 

 of these cases we have only the descendants of the domesticated horses 

 which have escaped and resumed the feral state. The true Wild Horse , 

 or Tarpan is now to be found only in the wildest Steppe district of 

 Asia, and you will notice from the next slide one or two important 

 characteristics distinguising it from our tame varieties. It is a 

 much clumsier, big featured form, rough in general appearance, 

 the mane short, and half-erect, — the last survivor of the ancient 

 pre-historic horse, yet the form from which was derived the last 

 winner of the Derby. The bare fact, that from such as these, man 

 has been able to develop so many forms for his own uses, prepares 

 us to accept the idea of the original pre-historic progenitor having 

 in its turn been evolved from some form older still. The date of 

 the domestication of the Horse is altogether unknown ; we find 

 representations of it on the monuments of Assyria and of Ancient 

 Egypt, dating as far back as 1800 or 1900 B.C., introduced into 

 the latter country by the Shepherd Kings, and we have notices of 

 it almost as old as that in our Bible. But it had been subdued by 

 man long before that date ; its bones are found mingled with tools 

 and weapons of Early Man, who amused himself in his leisure 

 time by cutting sketches of it on bits of horn or bone, the large 

 muzzle and the short stiff mane being well shown. 



Fossil, or rather sub-fossil Horses — true modern forms are 

 found in the most recent of the Tertiary deposits (Pleistocene) in 

 many parts of the world and are not unknown in our own neighbour- 

 hood. But below the Pleistocene we cease to find the modern 



