4 THE VETERINARY DOCTOR. 
THE HORSE IN HISTORY. 
Traces of the horse have been found in nearly all ages and all countries 
since the flood, the period at which history seems to have dawned. From 
time to time as the exigencies have demanded varieties of the horse have 
been produced suitable for the purposes required of them. In following the 
march of civilization from the very first, the finer breeds appear to have 
been maintained hy the introduction of the Arab stock. Egypt, the most 
ancient of civilized monarchies that have left monuments to tell their history. 
as we gather from Rawlinson’s “Ancient Egypt,” introduced horses, prok- 
ably from Arabia, under the eighteenth dynasty, and they seem not to 
have been known in the earlier times. They were regarded as too noble 
and perhaps too valuable for draught and agricultural purposes, like the ass 
and the ox, but were commonly either ridden or employed to draw curricles 
and chariots, chiefly by men of the upper classes. Great numbers were re- 
quired for the chariots and cavalry. <A brisk trade was carried on with 
Syria and Palestine where they were in great request and commanded high 
prices. It appears that they were not allowed to graze in fields but were 
kept constantly in stalls and fed on straw and barley. They seem to have 
resembled the Arab stock, being light, agile and high-spirited, and were 
probably introduced into Egypt by the Hyksos. 
The same class of horses apparently figures on the monuments of the 
ruins of Nineveh, Babylon, Assyria, Persia, and other ancient oriental coun- 
tries, while later, toward the decline of the Persian Empire and the rise of 
the Grecian, and about the time that the horse was beginning to be cultivated 
in Europe, the cavalry and war horse was stouter, of heavier quarters and 
limbs, drooping more at the croup, and altogether of a stockier mould and 
darker color. Peering into the realms of fancy we can weave a picture 
which the insufficient light of history can not satisfactorily complete. We 
can perhaps see the relation and conclude that the parent Aryan stock of 
the Caucasian civilization was the original possessor of the fine breed of 
horses known to oriental countries as the Arab, the white albinoish color 
and the refinement and symmetry peculiar to both going far in evidence. 
The great epoch in the history of the horse is at the time of the 
rise of the Indo-Germanic nations. Spain before England was the 
nursery of the fine blooded horse. The northern countries supplied the 
ponderous horse used for war. The cavalry of the time, requiring the heavy 
armor for both rider and horse, created the necessity of a heavy animal, and 
to this fact we are indebted for the introduction of the modern draught horse 
about the time of the Norman conquest. 
From that time the variety of purposes to which the horse has been, 
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